


the violence of comets

by viverella



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Tattoos, Canon Compliant, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Starfleet Academy, Tattoos, in a manner of speaking anyways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 14:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 57,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7226797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim has never once, in his life, believed in love. He wears his bare skin with only his own tattoo circling his ankle as a badge of honor. </p><p>He meets a man named Leonard McCoy on a shuttle in Riverside, Iowa who believes exactly the opposite. </p><p>(<a href="http://ntalias.co.vu/post/135898959804/empressnacho-eryuko-spookymileskane-au">That AU</a> in which everyone is born with a unique tattoo on their ankle that no one else has and every time you fall in love, their tattoo appears somewhere on your body.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. year one

**Author's Note:**

> YES HELLO IT IS I, CERTIFIED MCKIRK TRASH™️, RISING FROM THE DEPTHS OF TREK HIATUS HELL ONCE MORE. 
> 
> my long overdue ode to these two, hashed out in messy, way too long, way too cliché academy era fic. I've literally been meaning to write a fic like this for _years_ I adore academy era!mckirk so much and with the new film coming out, I figured no better time to finally put all of this down on paper right??? anyway this was supposed to be much shorter and v impressionistic but then plot happened, as one does, and well here we are.
> 
> super loose interpretation of the timeline set out in the aos universe (bc apparently rehashing and making slight au's of established timelines is all I'm good at these days) in three parts.
> 
> title borrowed from the poem quoted below.

_Desperate_  
_for the making of those candy-throated ghosts, I found the rooms between_  
_the violence of comets. I threw myself into anything’s path. Even the sky_  
_bent around me. How lonely to be something that nothing wants to kill._

_—[Jeremy Radin](http://columbiajournal.org/5-poems-by-jeremy-radin/) ___

 

 

Jim meets a man named Leonard McCoy on a shuttle headed from Riverside, Iowa to San Francisco, California and he doesn’t know it then, but it changes everything. Jim meets this man, who’s terrified of the path he has set himself on and terrified of his past, running just like Jim is, running and not punch-drunk like Jim is but just drunk, or on his way to it, bowing his head and hiding in his flask the whole ride there. Jim meets this man who threatens to throw up on him, lists a dizzying number of ways that what they’re about to fly into could eat them alive, and grumbles about the life he lost in a divorce that seems less like a divorce and more like a natural disaster, judging from the bitterness low in his voice and the weathered hunch in his shoulders, and Jim just thinks, _But did you love her? Do you still love her? Was it all worth it?_

McCoy spends the entire flight looking like he wants to hide somewhere deep inside himself and never come out, and Jim spends the entire flight wondering what it’s like to love so deeply and be wrecked so thoroughly, thinks about the lone tattoo circling his ankle, the band of black fading in a shower of dots into bare skin (a shower of stars, Grandpa Tiberius used to call it, as if he always imagined that his grandson belonged in the black). Jim thinks about the mark on his ankle and the bare expanse of skin everywhere else on his body, and he wonders what that would be like, to carry a reminder of so much loss. 

The shuttle spits them out into the bright but chilly San Francisco air and while everyone else is whisked off to move into the dorms and various orientation sessions, he and McCoy are left alone to be fitted with their cadet reds, the two older faces in the crowd of the young and bright and shiny, the two lost souls in the sea of hopeful kids still convinced of the greater good in the world. And if Jim had just walked out of that fitting room, his new life and his new uniform in hand, that might’ve been that. Starfleet Academy is, after all, huge, and Leonard McCoy is actually already Dr. Leonard McCoy whereas Jim hasn’t gone to a day of formal schooling since a few sparse weeks here and there as a teenager. Jim’s got a lot more catching up to do and that could’ve sent him to the complete opposite side of campus and, eventually, the galaxy as McCoy, and Jim may never have seen him again. 

Jim thinks about this a lot, later.

But for now, Jim shrugs into his bright new Starfleet issue jacket and strolls over to McCoy. He catches the apprehension on McCoy’s face, not quite masked by his deep scowl as he frowns down at his own new uniform (Jim wonders, absently, what it would feel like to be halfway through making a life only to be thrown back into something like this, something like youth without the youth), and Jim can just see it in McCoy’s eyes, the wariness, the flightiness, like he might run at any minute without an anchor weighing him there. So Jim does what he does best and slaps on his bravado and wide smiles, offering McCoy a friendly clap on the shoulder.

“Looking good, Bones,” Jim says and grins, like he isn’t lost himself, like he’s any surer of his decision than McCoy is. 

McCoy turns his scowl on Jim and grumbles, “Who the hell is that?”

Jim just grins wider and stoops to haul McCoy’s duffle bag over his shoulder (with no bags of his own, it seems wrong to walk off and leave McCoy alone with the weight of everything). “C’mon,” Jim says, light and easy like he’s trying to soothe an injured animal. “Let’s find out where you’re living.”

McCoy narrows his eyes, and Jim thinks _trust issues, maybe_ , which in hindsight is probably unfair, considering. 

“Like hell you’re finding out where I live—Give me that,” McCoy protests, reaching to grab his bag back from Jim. “I don’t even know you.”

Jim ducks out of McCoy’s reach and laughs, “Oh come on, everyone needs friends. What better time to make them?”

And he half expects McCoy to protest with something cynical and grim and accented just so ( _I don’t need friends_ , the added _idiot_ implied), but McCoy just curses under his breath and scoops up his other bag, begrudgingly trudging off with Jim to figure out where they are and where they need to be. 

“Don’t you have any bags, kid?” McCoy asks him as they walk across Starfleet’s wide campus together for the first time. 

Jim shakes his head and shrugs, saying, in a poor imitation of McCoy’s lazy Southern drawl, “All I got left is my bones.”

McCoy glares at him, but Jim is pretty sure that he at least considered laughing about it, so he considers it a win.

(And without his meaning to, despite his best intentions, the nickname sticks. And so Bones becomes Bones, and later, Jim can hardly remember a time when Bones was anything else.)

\---

The thing is, Jim can hardly remember being almost-friends with Bones, that awkward stage where you aren’t sure what you can or can’t say, when you aren’t sure where to draw the line between impersonal and too much. All Jim can remember, in the months and years that follow, is meeting him on that shuttle to San Francisco and then jumping headfirst into the new lives they’ve committed themselves to, running to Medical when his xenolinguistics class gets out early one day to pick Bones up for dinner and drinks, because he knows it’s been a long week for both of them and they deserve it. 

He shoves his hands into his pockets as he trudges across campus to the infirmary. A nasty cold has been making its rounds and Bones has been working extra hours to help see all the anxious students coming in with runny noses and sore throats. It’s something of a miracle, Jim thinks as he steps through the doors to the medical facility, that Bones hasn’t gotten sick himself yet. Bones hasn’t said anything, but Jim’s noticed the bags weighing under Bones’ eyes and the hunch in his shoulders like he hasn’t slept well in days pulling these long hours, and Jim worries sometimes, quietly, inexplicably. 

Jim loiters in the waiting room for a few aimless minutes, grinning at a couple of the nurses who’ve begun to recognize him by now, and wonders how they must see him. Is he, to them, just another cadet waiting for his friend to get off work so they can paint the town together, or is he, first and foremost, George Kirk’s son, the wonder child, the miracle of a boy who was, by anyone’s estimation, never meant to live this long? It’s a question Jim has run from his entire life, choosing to lose himself in the endless routine and anonymity of his Midwest home instead of doing something more, instead of chasing the stars like his parents did, or at least chasing some sort of dream. It’s something he’s very purposefully never had to think about, but now he can feel the weight of it in the eyes of his classmates, his professors, every damn person he meets at Starfleet. And it’s like he doesn’t even exist. Because he’s not Jim, the kid who grew up surrounded by too much hurt and not enough love, the guy who still – _still_ , after so many years – sometimes wakes up with screams caught in his throat and the ghosts of his past flashing under his eyelids; to them, he’s just a symbol of duty and loss.

Bones emerges shortly from one of the examination rooms, and he’s chatting quietly with a cadet who’s young and looks like it might be her first time living away from home, and he’s talking her down from some anxieties about being sick. And this is what surprises Jim, still, because he doesn’t see Bones like this often, because he’s gotten used to Bones’ cynical grumblings and dry humor over the weeks they’ve known each other, but not _this_ , this incredible gentleness that Bones summons and the utter genuineness of his softness as he reassures the cadet that she just needs rest and fluids and if she’s still not feeling better in a few days, she can fill this prescription and she’ll be just fine. 

“Bones!” Jim cheers as Bones sends the cadet on her way.

Bones looks over at Jim, and in that instant before his eyebrows furrow and the exhaustion settles back into his features, Bones’ eyes land on Jim and Jim thinks he’s never seen someone look so soft. And then Bones frowns and blinks in surprise, and the moment bursts, and Jim shoves his hands into his pockets and rocks back onto his heels, smiling a little and trying to ignore how it feels odd on his face. 

“Jim,” Bones says and stops. He blinks and squares his shoulders, righting himself, and asks, “What’re you doing here? Don’t you have class?”

Jim shrugs. “Got out early,” he says and looks away. “Figured you might want to go out for dinner and a beer.”

There’s a beat, and for a wild, unreasonable moment, Jim almost thinks Bones is going to say no, which makes no sense because Bones has never said no to dinner and drinks before, but he feels something heavy sink in his gut anyway. 

“Sure,” Bones says, jolting Jim out of his thoughts. “Just give me a minute to change.”

And so Bones disappears into the staff area and emerges again some minutes later wearing his civvies like Jim, handing off a PADD to one of the nurses and murmuring something quiet to her, a friendly hand hovering over the small of her back. He gives her a small smile before heading over to Jim and shrugging his coat on. He raises an eyebrow at Jim as Jim falls into step with him. 

“Where are we going, kid?” Bones asks, turning up his collar against the perpetual San Francisco chill as they step outside. Jim thinks about the happy smiles that Bones summons when he’s working, thinks about the exhaustion coloring Bones’ every word, and he wonders who takes care of Bones when he’s too busy taking care of everyone else.

“There’s this new ramen place that’s supposed to be really good,” Jim offers instead of saying something stupid like, _Are you okay_ or _When is the last time you slept_.

Bones hums, like he’s interested but that’s all he can muster at this point, and his shoulders bump against Jim’s once or twice as they make their way off campus, and Jim can’t figure out what the knot in his stomach means.

\---

Jim’s not really sure when or why or how it starts, but it does. He rationalizes later that it’s because he didn’t want to walk all the way to Medical to get a few scrapes treated or that it’s because half the time when he goes out, Bones stays in and it’s lame and he means to tell Bones so every chance he gets or even that it’s just because Bones is the best doctor he knows and the only one he trusts. It’s all a bunch of bullshit, probably. But anyway, it happens. 

Jim, because he’s always thought with his fist first and his head a handful of seconds later, drunkenly stumbles his way to Bones’ dorm late one night nursing a split lip and an aching head and pounds on Bones’ door for a good five minutes before he hears Bones shout at him to stop in response. Jim probably knows Bones’ door code, but he can’t seem to remember it over the pounding in his temples. 

After a moment, the door slides open, and Jim, who made the poor decision of leaning most of his weight against it, trips and almost falls face first into Bones. Bones, who, when Jim rights himself enough to stop his head from spinning, Jim sees is glaring at him through eyes that are only half-awake, his hair uncharacteristically tousled. He’s wearing pajama bottoms that look at least five years old and have little holes wearing into them and little else and Jim, for a moment, is stunned by how broad Bones’ chest is. Jim supposes he knew that Bones is fit and in shape and is probably in a combat class even though he’s not in Jim’s – it’s a requirement for all personnel after all – but he hasn’t really thought about it till now. Jim frowns and considers poking Bones, just to make sure he’s real.

“What the hell do you want? Do you have any idea what time it is?” Bones grumbles and rubs at his eyes. And then he freezes, and it’s like he actually sees Jim for the first time, and his frown deepens, colored with something like concern now instead of annoyance. “Jesus, Jim, what happened to you?”

Jim shrugs and licks his lips, a metallic taste filling his mouth as he pushes past Bones into his room. “I was having drinks with some people from class, and some guy was being a creepy asshole to a couple of the cadets,” Jim says, trying to find the least alarming way to phrase _I got in a bar fight_. “I told him to kindly fuck off, and apparently that meant my face deserved an introduction to his fist.”

He hears Bones sigh softly behind him and flops down face first onto Bones’ bed, which is soft and nice and Jim almost forgets why he came here in the first place. He’s drunk and it’s been a long week. He deserves a good night’s sleep in a soft bed. 

“You know Medical is open 24/7 for this express purpose,” Bones says, but Jim can already hear Bones rifling through his things for his medkit anyways, like he knows Jim is wary of doctors even though Jim’s never said as much, like he knows that Jim will fight tooth and nail to avoid a trip to the hospital. 

Jim rolls over onto his back, propping himself up on his arms to watch Bones rummage around his room. Bones reaches up to the top shelf of his closet, exposing the length of his side, and Jim frowns through the dim light at the faint outline of a tattoo on his ribcage, what looks like a cluster of three overlapping vaguely triangle shaped figures that might, in a minimalistic way, resemble mountains. Jim looks away, suddenly dizzy. 

“You’re not going to throw up, are you?” Bones asks, pulling up a chair to the edge of the bed and nudging Jim’s legs apart a little to give himself more room to work. 

Jim shrugs and doesn’t meet Bones’ eyes, unsure of why he feels so unsteady. His eyes land on Bones’ side again like they’re being pulled there by gravity, and he sees that it is indeed a little mountain range inked into his side, and it’s faded and a little warped around the edges like it’s been there for years and his skin has gotten scarred where the shapes are, which when he thinks about it, doesn’t really make sense at all. He spies another tattoo too – a simple circle on the inside of Bones’ right bicep – but this one looks clean and pristine instead of like someone tried to erase it from Bones’ skin. Jim frowns and tries to gather up his thoughts to form something real. 

Bones’ hand at his jaw derails his train of thought before he can string together a coherent sentence. Jim winces. 

“Ow,” Jim mutters half-heartedly.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Bones grumbles in return, trying to assess the damage Jim’s face has suffered with his tricorder. Bones lets out a sigh and reaches for his dermal regenerator, asking, a touch lighter now like he’s trying to be something like kind, “You always this much of a mess?”

Jim laughs, and he can feel how the motion reopens his split lip, which stings and makes Bones swear under his breath. Bones sets to work fixing up Jim’s face, and he’s so close to Jim that Jim can see the places where his past has begun to etch faint lines into his skin, around his eyes and brows, and he can see the distinct fade in Bones’ eyes between the light brown around his pupils to the grey-green around the edges of his irises. The hand Bones has holding up Jim’s jaw is steady, and Bones is more at home than Jim thinks he’s ever seen him. Jim wonders if this was the person that Bones was before his world fell apart, wonders if the Bones that Jim never got to meet was this sure and stable, capable and firm but gentle and warm all the time. Jim wonders if that person still exists and if he’ll ever meet him, or if this person is only something Bones is in passing now.

Bones works carefully and methodically and Jim lets his eyes wander again because he’s starting to feel a little off kilter again. He looks over Bones’ room – at the neat stack of PADDs on his desk, the expensive bottle of bourbon tucked at the back of his desk probably for special occasions only, the holos sitting on his bedside table (there’s a little girl in one of them, Jim notices, and his chest aches for no discernable reason) – and eventually, he runs out of things to look at and his eyes wind up on the tattoo on Bones’ side again. Upon a second inspection, Jim finds that there really is a scar running through the mark, a thin, straight line, and, drunk and tired and a little too warm, he suddenly wants to ask so many things. Like _How did it start_ or _How did it end_ or, perpetually, always, _Was it worth it_. But Jim’s tongue is heavy in his mouth, like it’s made of lead, so he does the only other thing he’s ever learned. 

Jim reaches out and touches the very tips of his fingers to the tattoo on Bones’ ribs, running them over the line cutting the tattoo in half laterally, feeling where the skin is raised because no one bothered to regenerate it properly (to be a doctor, Jim thinks, and to still bear old scars like they don’t know how to heal wounds by now), and Jim just _knows_. There’s something deliberate about the scar, something angry and bitter, like Bones wanted to make her just a little bit less real in his life, like he wanted to prove that he didn’t love her or need her after all. Jim wonders what the truth is, wonders if the truth even exists in something like this. And Bones has never said anything and Jim has never asked, because Jim has never been sure if it’s his place, because he doesn’t know what Bones would do, if he would retreat back into the person he hid inside on that shuttle in Riverside, and Jim has come to like the person he’s gotten to know at Starfleet so much more.

Bones jumps at Jim’s touch, like he’s startled (like he’s been burned), and he sighs. “Jim,” he says slowly, like the words are being drawn out of him one at a time. “Sit still and don’t distract me.”

Jim lets his arm drop. “Sorry,” he mumbles, trying to ignore the foreign feeling buzzing in his fingertips. 

Bones takes another few minutes on Jim’s face before moving on to inspect Jim’s hands, and by the time he’s done, Jim’s knuckles and his face and his mouth are all shiny and red and new, and Bones sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. He starts putting his things away and gestures vaguely in the direction of the door. 

“You should be fine,” Bones says, going to put his medkit away. “Just don’t pick at anything. Now, I need to sleep. I have to go to work in the morning.”

And part of Jim knows that Bones means for him to leave, means this as a kind way of saying _Leave me alone or so help me_ , but the other part of Jim is tired and Bones’ bed is soft and inviting, so Jim just kicks off his shoes and flops back in Bones’ bed, burrowing under the blankets before Bones can get a word in edgewise. Jim hears Bones sigh again from across the room and soft footsteps patter closer. Bones nudges his side firmly.

“Jim,” Bones says, and when Jim just mumbles incoherently, Bones shoves him again. “Jim, come on. I need my bed to sleep.”

The reasonable thing, Jim knows, would be to get up, however begrudgingly, and leave Bones be because Jim knows Bones’ schedule by now and he really does have a busy day in the morning, but Bones’ sheets smell freshly washed and Jim’s so cozy beneath Bones’ sheets that all he can make himself do is roll over until he hits the wall to make room for Bones in a bed that, in truth, was probably only made for one. There’s a moment of silence, like Bones is weighing his options and maybe considering the merits of just giving up and sleeping on the floor, and Jim thinks, for a horrible moment, that maybe he’s made a terrible mistake, that this isn’t the type of friends that Bones sees them as. But then, the bed dips down next to Jim, and Jim feels Bones’ legs knock against his as he settles down in the bed next to Jim, and Jim lets out a breath in a long _whoosh_. Bones turns the lights off and tugs on the blankets that Jim’s hogging, and then it’s quiet and still and Jim can hear the steady in and out of Bones’ breathing.

After a moment, Jim peeks an eye open and is met with the dim outline of Bones’ face, Bones lying on his stomach with his arms shoved up under his pillow.

“Hey Bones?” Jim ventures, feeling suddenly too small and too quiet. 

“Yeah, kid?” Bones says in return, and his voice is already getting low and rumbly with sleep.

Jim smiles even though he knows Bones won’t see and he can feel the new skin on his face pull where Bones so carefully patched him up. “Thank you,” he says softly, and he’s not even sure Bones hears him, but it doesn’t really matter, in the end.

(When Jim wakes up in the morning, there’s a huge glass of water and a hypo to ease the hangover symptoms on the nightstand waiting for Jim with a note that reads, _Throw up in my bed and I’m never speaking to you again_. Somehow, it’s the sweetest thing anyone’s done for him all week.)

\---

 _How can you stand it?_ , Jim sometimes thinks, looking at Bones, looking at the way Bones scowls and rubs at his side where Jim knows the tattoo his ex-wife left behind is, the only thing of them she’s let him keep. 

_How can you stand it?_ , Jim sometimes thinks and never asks, because despite all the sarcasm, despite all the rolled eyes and scowls, there’s something brittle about Bones, like he carries with weight of everything he’s ever experienced and more on his back.

 _How can you stand it?_ , Jim wants to ask and he can’t, he won’t, but he feels it right on the tip of his sometimes, pressing at the roof of his mouth. So he does the next best thing – he phones a friend. 

“How can you stand it?” Jim asks, finally, weeks after the question found its way to the base of his throat. 

Gaila looks up from her computer, where she’s frantically combing through her code for a project for one of her computational systems classes, having shoved Jim off of her, warm and sleepy and blissfully post-coital, to try to find the bug that she’s suddenly realized her code contains. Gaila, who Jim met in his second week of class because they were partnered up for a project they ended up having to pull multiple all-nighters for. Gaila, who’s bright and beautiful and never more so than now, like this, excited and enthralled and neck deep in something she’s so passionate about that it makes Jim wonder, sometimes, how it’s possible to compress that much light into one body. Gaila, who like Jim has run from her old life with no home and no real family to return to, who like Jim takes comfort in physical intimacy without any promise of anything deeper or real. Gaila, who all the same has countless tattoos covering her green skin like her heart is too big for her own good. 

Gaila blinks at Jim, her eyes a little spacey around the edges as she pulls herself away from her code. “Stand what?” she asks. 

Jim shrugs and resettles himself amongst Gaila’s pillows, staring at the long line of her bare back as she twists to face him from where she’s perched at her desk, staring at the intricate pattern following the length of her spine. He gestures vaguely. “All of that,” he says. “Your tattoos – you’ve fallen in love with so many people but you’re not—you don’t have a romantic partner now. That means you must’ve had your heart broken a lot in the past. How can you stand that?”

Gaila looks at him for a long moment, something quiet and thoughtful overtaking her expression, before she sighs and slinks back over to the bed, sitting at the foot of the bed to face Jim. “Love is not a burden you must shoulder for the rest of your life,” she says, kicking her feet against his. “Not even lost love.”

Jim frowns and shifts, uncertain. “But all that heartbreak,” he says, almost hesitantly, because he’s never said this before, not to anyone. 

Gaila laughs, and it’s gentle and kind. “That doesn’t make any of the good parts any less good or worth experiencing,” she says, and she looks down at her arm and runs her hand along a spiraling tattoo sitting where her forearm meets her elbow. “It doesn’t have to take away from the joy that you felt or the happy memories you created. And yeah, it hurts when it’s over, but I look back at all the times I’ve loved and there was always something good about it that made it worth it. And that’s what living is about, isn’t it? Making the best and experiencing the most that you can?”

Jim feels something heavy pull in his chest and thinks about the line slashing through Bones’ tattoo, thinks about the way his mother never wore short sleeves on the rare occasions she was shoreside, lest the mark on her arm show (the only tattoo on her body beside her own, remarriage be damned).

“But it hurts,” Jim says, and he hates how young he sounds, hates the terrified edge to his voice that he tries to keep wrapped up inside himself, guarded by sunny smiles and witty quips. 

Gaila looks at him like she’s never seen him before, like he’s something precious and maybe a little sad, and Jim looks away, a deflection already prepped on the tip of his tongue. But she crawls a little closer to him on the bed, resettling herself by his side and placing a hand over his chest like she knows his heart never learned to be as generous as hers. 

“Love is not a poison, Jim,” she says gently. “You can choose to feel something without feeling like you’ve signed your life away.”

Jim thinks about what she says all day, because there’s a quiet resonance in her words, but it does nothing to alleviate the knot in his gut. He doesn’t know what kind of an answer he’d been looking for when he’d asked her the question, and he doesn’t know that any answer would have made him feel better. And, when he really thinks about it, he’s not sure why he’s so worked up about it in the first place. It’s not like Jim is looking to fall in love anyways.

\---

Years later, when Jim looks back on his years at the Academy, he’ll always remember that first year as the time when Bones went home, when Georgia still held enough emotional weight in his life for him to return to it. Bones goes home for Thanksgiving, leaves Jim with half of a smile and warm hand on his shoulder and a _Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone, kid_ , and goes home for several days again, just before Christmas, leaving behind the little Christmas tree Jim got Bones for his desk, with its twinkling lights and the little wrapped presents sitting under it, leaving behind Jim. Bones goes home because he has a family to return to, however dilapidated it may be; he’s got grandparents and cousins and probably aunts and uncles too, and it’s all so foreign to Jim that when Bones leaves, he’s not sure what to do with himself. 

Holidays were never a big deal in his household growing up, what with his mother taking every excuse she could to be up in the black and the shitty excuse for a step-father she left him and his brother with, but holidays around Starfleet feel somehow fresh and new, and in the days leading up to the big ones like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Jim can practically feel the campus buzzing with festive spirit. And Jim, to his credit, makes a valiant effort to enjoy the various holidays that first year as best he can, goes with his roommate and some friends from class to the big Thanksgiving feast Starfleet throws for the students who stay for break, goes along with it a month later when Gaila finds him and drags him out to a Christmas party at a bar just a little off campus on Christmas Eve. He even lets her stick a Santa hat on his head and pass him drinks all night and even has fun, dancing with Gaila and doing a round of shots with a couple classmates from his hand-to-hand combat class and badgering Uhura, who as it turns out is Gaila’s roommate, into buying him a drink since she’s so stubborn about not letting him buy her one. 

And Thanksgiving ends up being fine, because it’s just a few days and then everyone and Bones comes back when classes start up again, and Jim finds enough errands to run and there’s enough people to see that Jim doesn’t feel the strange hollowness in his chest, but Christmas is different. Christmas, most people go home, except for those whose homes are too far away or those whose homes haven’t been home for quite some time. Christmas, campus starts to feel too big and too vacant, and Bones packs up his things to go almost a week before Christmas with a promise to be back before the new year. And Jim doesn’t want to admit it, not even to himself, because it feels childish and petty, but he goes to the parties and he hangs out with the friends who’ve stayed in town and it should all be fine, but he ends up feeling more alone than he has in months.

And so, Christmas Eve sees Jim ducking out of the Christmas party early even though it’s only a little past midnight and someone’s already offered to buy the next round, and he wanders his way back to campus, tipsy enough that he’s feeling the full heaviness in his chest but not drunk enough to be really mopey yet. Campus is dark as Jim walks back, and the perpetual San Francisco fog has rolled in, making Jim feel oddly claustrophobic as he tugs his jacket tighter around himself. He doesn’t really think about where he’s going as he wanders his way back to the dorms, just that he’d really like another drink before going to bed, preferably something good, something to take his mind off of how heavy his gut feels, and when he looks up, he finds that he’s brought himself to the graduate student dorms without realizing it. And there’s no reason, really, for him to stop here because Bones isn’t even in San Francisco, but Bones has nice bourbon in his room and all Jim and his roommate, Sora, have left from their holiday revelries is shitty beer, and anyways Jim’s pretty sure he saw Sora getting pretty cozy with some guy at the bar earlier and Jim’s not really in the mood to deal with that if Sora decides to bring the guy back to their room, so he makes his way up to Bones’ room, thinking he’ll just have one drink. 

Jim finds Bones’ room just how he last saw it, the little Christmas tree Jim got Bones still twinkling softly on the corner of Bones’ desk, the wrapped presents that showed up in the final days of class still sitting under it, the lazily made bed still rumpled in places where Bones had set down piles of things to pack for home. There’s something strangely homey about Bones’ room that Jim can’t explain, something welcoming and warm that Jim’s own room with his few belongings doesn’t have, and as Jim pours himself a glass of bourbon from Bones’ stash and drops himself down into Bones’ desk chair, he feels something settle in his chest, like he’s finally somewhere he belongs. 

The dorm is uncharacteristically quiet, the majority of its students gone off to spend time with family for the holidays, and off in the distance, Jim can hear a couple rogue fireworks going off. Jim sips at his pilfered bourbon, wondering what holidays are like in the McCoy household – whether they’re loud, boisterous events with family filling up every corner of the house or if they’re quiet and somber, a time of reverence – and Jim feels incredibly small sitting alone in a room that isn’t his. He can barely remember the Christmases from his childhood, the only real Christmases he ever got, sharing a room with Sam at Grandpa Tiberus’ house, sneaking downstairs to peek at the presents waiting under the tree in the hours and minutes before midnight. 

Jim sips at his drink until there’s nothing left, and then he stares at the bottom of his empty glass and wonders what he should do next, wonders why he feels so lost. Jim has always been good at having direction in his life, even if that direction was adamantly and purposefully having _no_ direction the past few years in Riverside, and he can’t for the life of him figure out why he suddenly feels unmoored. He kicks his feet to spin himself around and around in Bones’ desk chair feeling childish and silly and alone. 

The one drink Jim promised himself accidentally ends up turning into two and then to three, Jim rationalizing to himself the whole time that because he knows that one of the presents under the tree is a nice, expensive bottle of bourbon that he got Bones for Christmas it makes everything okay, but it leaves him feeling a little guilty about it anyways. When he checks the time, he sees that a couple hours have passed, and he thinks he’d better be heading out, hoping Sora and whatever guy he brought back to their room have passed out so Jim doesn’t have to round this night off with walking in on his roommate hooking up with someone he met at a bar. He makes as if to leave and then after a moment’s thought, goes to rinse out his glass in Bones’ sink, thinking at least he’ll choose not to be an extra shitty friend. He sets the glass back down on Bones’ desk where it belongs, next to the other glass and the now almost empty bottle of bourbon, and as he’s leaving Bones’ room and the door slides open for him, he almost runs face-first into Bones himself. Bones, who’s hauling his huge duffle bag over his shoulder like the first day Jim met him. Bones, who looks exhausted and bleary-eyed and thoroughly startled to see Jim. Bones, who’s back several days early (back home, Jim can’t help thinking, and then stops himself). 

Bones jerks back in surprise and almost drops his bag. “Jesus Christ, Jim,” he breathes out, scrubbing his free hand over his face. He shakes his head and shoves past Jim into the room. “What the hell are you doing in my room?”

“Uh,” Jim says and rubs the back of his neck, not knowing how to explain himself without sounding completely ridiculous and childish. Jim clears his throat and changes the subject instead. “What are you doing back? I thought you weren’t going to be back till New Year’s.”

Bones wearily drops his bag by the foot of his bed and mumbles under his breath, so softly that Jim would almost think he was hearing things except that somewhere, deep in his gut, that this is the cold, hard truth, the kind that haunts the darkest parts of your dreams, the kind that never quite goes away no matter how hard you push. 

“Yeah, well,” Bones says, shoulders hunched and turned away from Jim, like he can’t or won’t meet his eyes. “Turns out, when you kill your grandfather’s only son, you’re not welcome at home for the holidays anymore.”

Jim drops down into Bones’ desk chair again and lets out a long breath. “Shit,” he breathes out. “Shit, Bones, I’m sorry. I’m sure you didn’t—I mean, that’s so unfair. You didn’t kill your dad.”

And Jim doesn’t know much about Bones’ family, just that he’s outlived his parents and his sister, that he like Jim has very little left to call his own. He remembers Bones saying something once about a shuttle accident, something about bad luck and sick family, but Bones has never said much head-on. But Jim feels like he knows Bones, even though they’ve only known each other for a handful of months, and he just knows that Bones, who under all the gruffness and the cantankerous front is one of the kindest people Jim knows, who takes his oath to do no harm more seriously than almost anything else, wouldn’t do that, especially not to his father. 

Bones sighs and tugs his shirt up over his head, tossing it aside before rummaging through his bag for a clean one. From this angle, Jim can just spy the tattoo of those three triangles and the faint line that runs through them like a reminder of what’s been lost. Jim wonders if home is still where she is, wonders what being home without being with her means to Bones now. If Jim were better at being a friend, he might’ve asked, might’ve tried to help Bones sort through all of the heaviness that the word _home_ must hold for him now, but Jim is tired and a little drunk and far too fucked up himself to know how to do any of that. Instead, he sits in silence and watches as Bones tugs a clean shirt over his head – one of his ratty old ones from medical school, faded and worn through in places. When Bones comes over to his desk, he leans past Jim to reach towards his bottle of bourbon and pours himself a generous glass. 

“Don’t talk shit about things you don’t know,” he says, though his voice isn’t unkind, just tired in a way that Jim knows has nothing to do with sleep. Bones eyes the bottle. “Jeez, kid, you really cleaned me out, didn’t you?”

Jim shrugs guiltily, looking down at his hands. Suddenly, it feels cruel to have taken so much from him. “Sorry,” he mumbles. 

Bones lets out a long breath and drops down on his bed. He rests his elbows on his knees and says nothing for a long moment. Other than to lift his glass to his mouth, he doesn’t move either. Jim waits, knowing he should say something and hating that he doesn’t know what that thing is. 

“Few years ago,” Bones finally starts after the minutes stretch on so long between them that Jim starts to think that he might not ever see the end of them, “Before the divorce, before everything went to shit, my dad got sick. That was the start of it, I guess. He was in so much pain every day, couldn’t even get out of bed most days. There was no cure, and, _god_ , I must’ve worked for more than a year on that, trying to find a way to save him. But I couldn’t.”

Bones pauses then, his knuckles white on his glass. He takes a sip of his bourbon, his eyes glassy and faraway, and Jim feels something pull apart and crumble in his chest. 

“You didn’t kill him, Bones,” Jim says, hating how his voice come out in a weak rasp. For some reason, he wants to promise that things will be okay, that this isn’t the end of all things even though he knows that making such a promise would be entirely unreasonable, that Bones would never let him make it, that he would never let _himself_ make it. Instead, he says, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Bones barks out a laugh then, something bitter and high and it breaks through the stillness in the air like glass shattering. Jim almost flinches at the harsh sound. 

“That may not have been my fault, but helping my dad overdose on morphine sure was,” Bones all but spits out, like he can’t stand the taste of it in his mouth. His mouth twists into a sour smile, his eyes at once sharp and hollow. “Y’know what the worst part is? They found the cure three months later. I killed my dad for nothing.”

Bones tosses back the rest of his drink and wipes at his cheeks, now shiny with tears Jim suddenly realizes, and Jim, who has always prided himself on being self-possessed and smooth and always knowing what to say, finds himself at a loss for what to do. How do you tell someone who’s gone through so much hurt that the world is still an okay place? How do you tell someone who’s weighed down by loss and guilt that there will be an easy way to patch up all the holes? 

“It was what he wanted, though, right?” Jim says, finding his voice at last. He wobbles over the words, hoping he’s saying the right thing and not just making it all worse like he usually does. “It was his choice, and you can’t blame yourself for respecting a dying man’s wishes.”

Bones stares at the floor for a long moment, motionless, and Jim almost thinks that Bones didn’t hear him. But then Bones looks up and nods, like this is a truth he’s been trying to get himself to believe ever since it happened, and Jim supposes he should feel better that Bones is at least trying to pick up the pieces, that Bones heard and appreciated what he said, but he just feels heavy, like all his limbs have been filled with lead, instead. Bones sets his glass aside and rubs his hands over his face like he’s trying to wipe the grief from his skin. He takes a deep breath and when he looks at Jim again, he’s rearranged his expression into something careful and neutral, like he can’t let himself break. 

“Are most people’s Christmases this shitty?” Bones asks, and Jim almost breaks himself because he’s never heard Bones like this before, so hollow, so desperate for some kind of affirmation. 

Jim smiles and hopes it doesn’t betray the creaking feeling in his ribs. “Yeah, pretty much,” he says. And then he changes the subject to something lighter, because he knows like he’s thinking it himself that anything would be preferable to what they were just talking about. “Speaking of, did Santa bring me anything or am I going to spend another Christmas empty-handed?”

Bones snorts and gestures towards a small, square package under the miniature tree on his desk. Jim remembers putting the tree there, a couple weeks ago, remembers Bones rolling his eyes and asking Jim what the hell he was supposed to do with that, and as Jim reaches for the package and passes Bones the blue paper bag containing Jim’s present for him, Jim finds himself wishing he could see some of that lightness again. 

Bones smiles when he pulls the bottle of bourbon that Jim got him out of the bag, and it’s not as wide as he usually smiles when he parts with them like precious tokens, but it’s still soft and warm and that, Jim supposes, will have to be enough. 

“This mean you’re going to stop stealing all my liquor from me?” he says. 

Jim grins. “Nah,” he says, light and joking. “Just making sure I have better stuff to steal.”

Bones rolls his eyes, almost like he always does, and kicks Jim’s ankle. “Asshole,” he says. And then he sets his present down and nods towards the package Jim’s still just holding. “Open your present.”

Jim laughs and acquiesces, tearing away at the wrapping paper, surprised to find that for whatever reason, his heart is in his throat like he’s nervous, like there’s too much riding on this moment. It’s been years, Jim realizes, since he got a present from anyone. It’s been years since he’s had anyone who cared enough to get him one. 

When Jim rips off the paper, he finds a holo in his hand, shiny and new. He frowns and flicks it on, and when the image appears, Jim’s mouth drops open. There’s a new ship that Starfleet is building, to be dubbed the USS Enterprise upon its christening, and the holo Bones got him is a detailed blueprint for it, recently released as part of the promotion for the new ship. It’s still years away from being completed, but it’s to be the most advanced ship Starfleet has ever built, and they’ve been trying to drum up excitement about it for quite some time. Jim feels something warm and expansive swell in his chest as he eagerly looks it over, grinning as he spies the bridge, the captain’s quarters, the medical bay, and all of the little spaces that have yet to be filled in, with more rooms and people. He imagines strolling down those halls and sitting in the captain’s chair, imagines exploring the furthest reaches of the universe with nothing but the limits of his own curiosity stopping him. A laugh bubbles past his lips without his meaning to, and he shifts his gaze down to Bones, who’s watching him take it all in and finally, finally, smiling like he means it.

“Bones, this is incredible,” Jim says and means it, even though it feels awkward in his mouth. He hasn’t had much practice at being thankful, at having things to be thankful for. “Thank you.”

Bones grins, the lines around his eyes creasing just so. “Glad you like it,” he says, and he must be tired because the southern twang to his words is coming out deeper than usual. “It’s limited edition, you know. Part of their big countdown to when the ship’s taken out on its maiden voyage.”

Jim looks back at the holo, picturing himself taking it out on its first adventure, picturing it against the vastness of space. “That’s going to be my ship,” he says suddenly, softly, reverently. He’s never quite thought about it before but now that the words have been said, he feels it down to his bones, feels it like it’s the only truth in the world worth knowing. 

Bones looks at it too, leaning back on his hands. “Yeah,” Bones says, sounding like he believes it too. “Yeah, I know.”

And it catches Jim off guard, the certainty in Bones’ voice, because he hasn’t had anyone who’s believed in him like that for a long time too.

\---

After that first Christmas, Jim watches Bones working sometimes, watches the way he handles the panic and discomfort that accompanies sickness and pain. 

“I can fix that,” Bones sometimes says, patching up cuts and bruises and broken bones like it’s nothing, like it’s the most natural thing for him to do, and when he does, he’s so gentle that Jim can’t remember a time he thought of Bones as rough or harsh. 

“I can fix that,” Bones sometimes says, and Jim catches him when he thinks no one is watching and Jim sees the places that Bones is fractured in ways that Jim understands but also will never understand. 

“I can fix that,” Bones says, and Jim thinks about the darkness in Bones’ eyes that one night, thinks about the way he’s noticed the times that Bones has crumbled into the bottom of his glass since day one, and Jim wonders _but who’s going to fix you?_

\---

Jim barely gets a chance to breathe after the somber Christmas with Bones before the new year rolls in, bringing with it new promises and new opportunities and his least favorite day in the entire universe – his birthday. When all of Starfleet sits down to remember a man Jim will never know except in myth and the emptiness in his mother’s eyes. When Jim, the screwed up kid from a small town in Iowa who’s still trying to figure out his place in the world, ceases to exist and James Tiberius Kirk, his father’s legacy and the living symbol of hope, takes over instead. It’s something he’s always run from in some way, shape, or form, because he never feels smaller than when the weight of the entire world is on his back, no matter how important anyone tells him he is. When he was a kid, that meant running off into the fields behind his house until his home was just a speck in the distance or one time, stupidly, stealing his step-father’s car and driving it into a quarry. As he got older, it meant hiding at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey or trying to disappear into someone else’s skin, hoping that no one would care or notice enough to drag him out until the day was over. 

This year finds him doing more of the same, drowning himself in cheap but strong liquor in the back corner of a dive bar where no one will recognize him, where no one cares enough to pay attention to him. And it’s fine with him, spending his birthday alone in a place where no one wants or cares to know who he is, spending the day fading into the background, just another hunched figure in the back of the bar, trying not to be seen. It’s getting late enough in the night that it’s not technically his birthday anymore and the characters lingering around the bar still are shadier than they have been for the past several hours, but Jim looks around and sees ways to escape the reality that he will never be seen outside of his father’s shadow. Ever since he was born, he’s heard again and again about how he is so much his father’s son that it hurts to look at him sometimes, and he’s never learned how to be his own person, how to be someone other than the vague impression of a man he’ll never know. And that’s all he wants sometimes, to be seen as someone independent of any expectations or the weight of upholding the Kirk legacy, and times like this, when the whole world is turned to him, this is the closest he can get, letting himself dissolve into nothing but skin on skin and his name in some stranger’s mouth. It’s a shit substitute, but it’s as close as he can get to disappearing altogether. 

Jim is just thinking that maybe this is just the brand of numb he needs tonight when a low, rumbly voice interrupts his thoughts. 

“Buy you another drink?”

Jim’s head jerks up on instinct, something sharp, something real jumping low in his gut for the first time all day, but then his eyes land on Bones, who’s probably the last person Jim wants to see right now, who Jim has actively been avoiding all day, who Jim fears will choke him in pity and never let him breathe again. Because the thing is this – that Jim hasn’t had anyone since he was a kid, that Sam and Grandpa Tiberius understood him in a way that no one since and got that he needed to forget that it was his birthday, that all Jim has received since those hazy memories is a constant slew of misplaced, shallow sympathy that’s grated more than soothed. And he doesn’t need that, being coddled like he’ll fall apart, because even if he is, even if every time his birthday rolls around he feels like he’s being held together by nothing more than a single thread, he has never been made for that sort of gentleness. He’s been made a runner. 

Jim stiffens at the sight of Bones, an excuse on the tip of his tongue so he can bolt as soon as possible, but then Bones arches an eyebrow at him and the corner of his mouth turns up into a smirk like it’s any other day, and Bones says:

“Christ, you’re easy.”

Jim huffs out a breath that might’ve been a laugh on a better day but manages a small smile as he moves his feet off the seat across from him so Bones can slide into his booth. Bones settles down and takes a sip from his beer and then grimaces, glaring at his bottle. 

“What is this shit?” he mumbles.

Jim tips his glass towards Bones and downs the remainder of his whiskey. He sets the glass aside and grabs one of the other drinks he ordered when he sat down. He stares at his hands until his knuckles go white, waiting for Bones to start in on the probing questions, the worried eyes. He stares at his drink until his vision swims, waiting to drown. 

But the questions never come, and when Jim looks up, Bones’ eyes are soft and sad but not pitying. Instead, his eyes are sad in a way that speaks of the kind of company Jim keeps, that speaks of the kind of lost souls that Jim seems to gravitate towards. 

“You know,” Bones says, and when he speaks, his voice is so quiet that Jim can barely hear him over the din of the bar, “The year after my dad died, I couldn’t even set foot in my childhood home. Couldn’t talk to anyone I knew. It was like my dad’s ghost never left me.” Bones’ mouth twists into something distant and lonely. “I thought going home this time would be different, y’know? So much time had passed. So much time away. But it just reminded me about why I left. None of it could make up for all the shit that happened there, not even the good stuff – the people I loved, the family I once had. All I could see was what I’d done to my dad.”

Jim remembers suddenly a holo that Bones sometimes puts out on his desk – usually on bad days, on days when Bones is up to his elbows in assignments and exams and projects, on days when Bones has to work a double shift in medical on top of it all – and he remembers a little girl in it, no more than a few years old, laughing at something out of frame. Now that he thinks about it, she looks a little like him, the same curve to her mouth when she smiles, the same flop of soft brown hair. 

“The little girl in that picture,” Jim mumbles, not really meaning to but not entirely in control of himself enough to stop himself from thinking out loud.

If Jim were sober, he’d probably regret bringing it up, because he’s seen the way that Bones keeps the holo tucked at the back of his desk, the way that Bones’ expression breaks a little a bit around the edges when he sneaks a look at it out of the corner of his eye. If he were sober, Jim would probably backtrack and say sorry, say that Bones doesn't have to talk about it if he doesn't want to, but Jim isn’t sober, is in fact very, very far from sober, and he feels selfish and bitter and self-loathing, and all he can think about is that he needs anything other than is own thoughts swimming around in his head. He’ll hate himself later for it, probably, but he’ll deal with it when it comes.

Jim half-expects Bones to clam up, to retreat back into himself and into the bottle of beer in front of him like Jim’s doing, but instead, Bones heaves a sigh and sinks back into his seat and lets a small, wistful smiles float across his face. 

“Joanna, yeah,” he says quietly. There’s a beat, and for a second, Jim thinks that’s all Bones is going to say about it, but then Bones starts again, something nostalgic in his voice, and Jim wonders, not for the first time, what Bones was like before his whole world fell apart. “You know, I was always young doing everything – I went to college young, went to med school young, got married young. You get used to that, y’know?” 

Bones ducks his chin and his mouth pulls into something soft and fond. And nothing, nothing at all about Bones prepares Jim for what Bones says next, because then Bones tells Jim about becoming a parent young ( _not that young_ , Jim thinks, and then he thinks, _but what do I know about love and families?_ ). Bones tells him about his daughter, about being scared out of his mind not knowing if he could be tender enough for her, about being scared he’d be too tender, too soft, too protective. Bones tells him about holding her for the first time and laughing with his wife and feeling like nothing else mattered. Bones tells him about how she was colicky for months and months and kept them up half the night with her screaming and him and Jocelyn having to get up the next morning and still pretend to be real people when they both went back to work. Bones tells him about those months when his father was sick and holding Joanna late at night soothing her to sleep among beeping machines telling him his father was slowly dying. 

And Bones tells him, downing the rest of his drink and his eyes getting a little misty, about how Jocelyn won sole custody in the divorce because Bones was too much of a drunk mess to remember how to be a real adult after his father’s death, much less a good parent for a young child. He tells Jim about how he wanted to teach his daughter how to ride horses just like his father taught him and how he lives in fear that his daughter will grow up not remembering him because he’s here all the goddamn time and Jocelyn won’t speak to him and even when he’s done here, it’s not like he can go home anymore, anyways. This is his home now and he’ll probably get stationed on some starbase somewhere, and maybe Jocelyn will meet someone new and he’ll be replaced, like he never even mattered as a parent. 

And Bones talks and talks and talks until Jim feels like he could pick Joanna out in a crowd anywhere, and it’s not until much, much later, when Bones is walking Jim back to the dorms and nudging him into bed ( _Bones’_ bed, Jim realizes too late and hopes belatedly that it’s because Bones’ dorm is closer and not because Jim was being an asshole about going back to his own room) that Bones didn’t ask him a single thing about his birthday. It’s like Bones somehow knew that it hurts even to think about his birthday for too long, and instead of telling him to grin and bear it it for his own good like so many have in the past, Bones turned the spotlight on himself instead, dug up his own hurts and fears and guilts instead of asking Jim to dwell on his own. And Jim, who’s never gotten a birthday present he’s actually liked as far as he can remember, thinks as he’s drifting off to sleep to the sound of Bones getting ready for bed that Bones is maybe the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

\---

(Sometimes, looking back, Jim will think that if that first winter was the winter that the cracks in the both of them began to show, then the spring was the time that they started to try to stitch everything back together, if only to keep pace with the new broken places that made themselves known.)

(Sometimes, looking back, Jim will think of that spring as the time it was easy, without complication or agenda or the messiness of what came after, because both of them were too raw to poke at old wounds, too wounded to find new ones.)

(Sometimes, looking back, Jim will think that he doesn’t miss any of it at all.)

\---

In the summer, Jim thinks, time passes strangely in a way that he’s never noticed before. Maybe, Jim thinks, it’s because he never stayed in school for long enough to notice. Maybe he’s never cared enough to notice. Maybe, he thinks, it’s just that while he no longer has much required of him, Bones is on the graduate track, busy with research and his usual hospital duties while Jim putters around and tries to find things to do, and Jim has never had friends to wait up for before. 

He ends up taking some summer courses to make up for the courses that Starfleet refused to let him skip and picks up a job as a teaching assistant for a summer combat course and works security some nights when a bar near campus does pub nights and worries about the kids getting too rowdy. It’s easy work, arguably too easy for him, but if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s fighting, and sometimes, though he’s never admitted it to anyone, he looks around at all these young kids, so bright-eyed and hopeful and full of dreams about seeing the universe, and he thinks, _Hasn’t anyone told you how dangerous this all is?_ He thinks, _Don’t you know that better trained people than you have tried and failed to survive out there?_ He thinks, _You’re too young to die out there where no one can even hear you call out for help_. And he catches himself sometimes and knows he sounds just like Bones, can even hear it all in Bones’ voice, lazy southern drawl and gritty cynicism low in his throat, and Jim just knows that if Bones knew, he’d never let Jim hear the end of it. But all the same, he feels it, low in his gut, when he looks around the room and too many of his students look no older than eighteen or nineteen, and he thinks, _okay, okay, okay_ and teaches them how to fight for themselves because whatever’s out there sure as hell won’t.

In the summer, Bones is almost always busy. Bones still has his regular shifts at Medical, and he recently proposed his doctoral dissertation to the committee, so he’s got his hands full trying to prove that his research topic is doable and valuable when he’s not at work fixing broken bones. And when he’s not at work or in the lab doing research, he’s usually too exhausted to do anything but sit around and complain and grumble about needing more sleep, and Jim’s fine with that, mostly, but sometimes he wants to go out and get drinks and paint the town and Bones keeps telling Jim to bother his other friends for that. And it’s not the same, really.

There’s a rare weekend in the middle of July when Jim manages to talk Bones into cashing in some favors to get the weekend off from work and then talks Bones into forgoing a weekend of lab time to go on a small trip with him and Gaila and Uhura and Sora and a few of his favorite kids from his combat class ( _Come on, Bones, it’s summer! You might as well act like it for one weekend._ And then Bones snorting and protesting, _You don’t need me to go to the beach, kid_ and Jim laughing and bothering Bones until he’d said yes). And so they end up in Santa Cruz for the weekend at a beach house they rented just for the night, running up and down the rickety boardwalk that still stands there, refurbished every few years because the locals refuse to give it up. Bones grumbles about how this place is older than his great-grandfather Horatio and how do they know that any of these rides are safe anyways, and Jim laughs and laughs and laughs and drags Bones to various old-fashioned looking roller coasters and makes Bones split a cotton candy with him.

That evening, the kids from Jim’s combat class decide to make a bonfire on the beach in front of their beach house, and Jim sits up on the beach and watches as they run around and gather wood and shout over each other about who know how to best light a fire, never mind that one of them is an off-worlder and has never used Earth materials to set a fire before and none of them have any wilderness experience whatsoever. Jim kicks off his shoes and wiggles his toes in the sun-warmed sand, debating the merits of going over to help them when Bones drops down in the sand beside him and hands him a beer. Bones is barefoot, Jim notices, and when Bones sips at his beer and watches the kids bicker and Gaila, Uhura, and Sora laugh and pass around a bottle of wine between them, Bones’ eyes crinkle just so around the corners and Jim thinks that however begrudgingly Bones came here with them, it was worth it. Looking at him now, dressed down in a pair of worn-in old jeans and a soft t-shirt under a beat up leather jacket, his shoes discarded somewhere by the house, his face soft from the setting sun and the day of relaxation, Jim can almost picture it, like he likes to try to do every so often, the person Bones must’ve been before all the bullshit – the person who dreamed of saving the world, one life at a time, the person who fell in love with his high school sweetheart and tried to make it last through going to separate colleges, the person who fell head over heels for the girl of his dreams during junior year in college and didn’t even think to look back, the man who dreamed of raising his daughter in a small town, riding horses and picking peaches. Jim thinks about that person sometimes and thinks that if Jim had ever met that person, Bones would’ve been the softest person Jim had ever met. Jim thinks about Bones now and thinks about the bristles that Bones always seems to wear and thinks about how it makes Bones’ rare moments of tenderness seem that much brighter in comparison and can’t decide which version of the world he’d prefer. 

Jim lets his legs splay out in front of him, leaning back on his free hand, and his foot knocks against Bones’ ankle. Jim goes to move his foot out of the way with a mumbled _sorry_ and spies peeking out from the bottom hem of Bones’ pants three points of dark ink on Bones’ skin. Jim narrows his eyes at Bones’ tattoo and wonders how many people sport that tattoo too, wonders if it’s just Bones’ high school sweetheart or ex-wife or if there are more. 

“You know,” Jim says, apropos of nothing, trying to get the scramble of thoughts out of his head because it’s almost always too much, so he just talks and talks and talks until it all fades into background noise. “When I was a kid, my grandpa Tiberius used to say that the tattoos we’re born with tell us something about our lives.” 

Bones lets out a breath that might’ve been a laugh if he’d let it. “A lot of people think that, Jim,” he says. 

Something in Bones’ voice catches and tugs along Jim’s thoughts and he asks, “What do you think?” 

Bones shrugs and brings his knees up, resting his arms loosely around his legs. “I think we tend to try to find meaning in random things,” he says like he’s trying to be facetious, but there’s something solid and sure underneath it all, and there it is, the gritty cynicism, the part of Bones that’s been made rough by everything that's happened to him.  

Jim laughs, for lack of a better thing to do, and finishes off his beer. The evening breeze coming in off the water is chilly, but the sand is still warm and Bones next to him is warm and Jim feels warm all over and relaxed and happy and he tries to remember the last time he felt like this and comes away empty-handed.  

“My grandpa Tiberius used to say that mine meant I was always meant to go up into the black like my dad,” Jim says, and then he adds, like an afterthought, because it almost is an afterthought (because how do you love someone who’s only ever looked at you like the ghost of the husband she lost?), “And my mom.” 

Jim can feel Bones’ eyes on him, like a question is just on the tip of his tongue, but Bones must sense that digging up those skeletons from Jim’s very deep closet would put a damper on their nice evening, so he just looks away and keeps sipping on his beer. There’s a moment, and then Jim nudges Bones’ ankle with his foot. Bones presses his lips together like he’s trying to hide a smile. 

“My grandma,” Bones says quietly, like it’s a confession. His mouth twists and he rubs at his ankle over the three dots, one after another in a straight line. “After my dad died, after Jocelyn left me, I had a lot of bad nights. My grandma said to me one night that she thought my tattoo was an ellipse. She thought that it meant that there was always something more waiting for me. That I would pick myself back up again.” 

Bones’ expression is warm as he says this, even though there’s something heavy in his voice, and Jim tries to picture her, this woman who looked at her grandson living with the weight of taking his father’s, her son’s, life and could only think to respond with kindness. 

“You know,” Jim says, wondering, a little, what it’d be like to meet Bones’ grandmother, “It kind of looks like Orion’s belt. Like in the constellation.” He looks over at Bones and grins, a little cheekily. “Maybe you always belonged out there in the black too.” 

Bones snorts and finishes off his beer. “No way, kid,” he says, but his voice is light. “You’re not getting me in that flying metal deathtrap. At best, I’m parking myself on a nice starbase and staying there.” 

And Bones is mostly joking, Jim knows, because he has no idea where he’ll end up in a few years’ time when they both graduate and it’s summer and they’re on vacation and it’s not the time to talk about real things, anyways. But something about it hits Jim in the gut, making him feel heavy and breathless. He pictures it – flying out to the stars tasked with nothing but to explore to the farthest reaches of the stars – and he pictures it without Bones snarking in his ear at every turn. Jim twists his mouth to one side and tries not to frown. 

He looks at Bones, who’s looking at him with slightly pinched brows now like he’s getting worried that something’s wrong, and Jim thinks, _How could I?_ And he asks, maybe too seriously, “Then who’s going to be my CMO?” 

Neither of them have a good answer to that one. 


	2. year 2

A few weeks into the new academic year, just as San Francisco fall is in the full swing of the brief few weeks of warm weather it graces them with each year, Bones has a huge paper due for his xenobiology class due the next day and not enough hours to do it, and Jim camps out on Bones’ bed all night with his PADD to work on some homework of his own and catch up on celebrity gossip – solidarity and all that. And while Bones hunches over his desk and grumbles about the nuances of Andorian biology, Jim makes coffee and offers tidbits about did you know such-and-such couple broke up recently and what a mess and occasionally, makes Bones eat something so he doesn’t keel over halfway through his all-nighter. And somewhere along the way, Jim must fall asleep, because next he knows, he’s jerking awake and it’s only just beginning to get bright out and he can hear the birds starting to wake up outside and the lights are still on. Next to him, Bones is asleep on his stomach, still dressed in his clothes from the day before, sprawled out with his arms shoved up under his pillow. He’s pressed up against Jim hip to ankle in the full sized bed he managed to score by virtue of being a graduate level student with an M.D. to his name already, not to mention he picked up TA-ing a class of his own this fall, and Bones snores a little, softly. Jim checks the clock, wondering how long he’s been asleep. 

There’s a moment, and Bones scrunches his nose up in his sleep and presses his face deeper into his pillow, and Jim becomes suddenly intensely aware of a gnawing at the pit of his stomach. He wonders when the last time he ate was and why he doesn’t feel hungry. He nudges Bones, hard in the ribs just once to wake him up, and Bones is sleepy and warm. 

Bones cracks his eyes open and scrubs a hand over his face. “What time is it?” he mumbles, the words running into one another drowsily. 

“A little before six,” Jim says, his voice hushed though he doesn’t mean for it to be. He thinks that if he thought time during the summer had an odd quality, well it’s got nothing on waking up before sunrise after only a couple hours’ sleep.

“Fuck,” Bones groans and shoves his face back into his pillow. 

He’s still for a long moment and Jim almost thinks that he’s fallen back asleep, but then Bones suddenly rouses himself, shoving himself ungracefully out of bed and trudging back to his desk with lurching speed. As he gets back to work, scrolling through the file he’d been working on to find his place again, his hair sticks up at odd angles from having been pressed into the pillows. There’s something practiced about the way he settles back into his work, a crease on his brow and the firm set of his shoulders, and Jim is reminded, not for the first time, that this isn’t Bones’ first time through school; it’s not even his second. Jim wonders what that must be like, wonders what it would be like to be the type of person who could sign themselves up for it again and again and again, knowing that more school means more work, more all-nighters, more family members wondering at you when your real life will begin. 

Jim smiles a little to himself and yanks Bones’ blanket up to his chin, still drowsy. It smells clean and slightly floral, like the shampoo Bones uses, and the bed is still warm from their nap, the pillows dipped in the places where they slept, but Jim finds himself feeling rather cold. He shivers, and squeezes his eyes shut, hoping the pricking on his skin will be gone by morning.

\---

In just a few short weeks, San Francisco transforms from the wonderful, sunny stereotype of California to the foggy reality that Jim has come to know. The cool early fall breeze nips at his cheeks as he trots with Gaila across campus to pick Bones up before heading out to a new Vietnamese restaurant near campus that’s supposed to have amazing pho, and after a few glorious weeks of the true summer warmth Jim hasn’t experienced since leaving Iowa, he chafes slightly at the returning chill, though he doesn’t remember it bothering him so much the year before.

“You know,” Gaila says to Jim as she keeps pace with him, light on her toes. “I quite like your doctor. It was lovely meeting him this summer.”

Jim hums and sidesteps a couple too engrossed in what they’re talking about to notice him. Gaila continues on talking, unfazed by Jim’s quietness or the cool air around them, dressed trendily in a short dress.

“I feel I’ve learned a lot about you,” she says. 

At that, Jim snorts and raises his eyebrows at her. “ _Me_?” he asks. 

Gaila smiles serenely at him. “You learn a lot about a person by meeting those they consider their closest friends,” she says matter-of-factly. Then she smirks, just a little. “And anyways, I was getting curious about what kind of person could put up with you barging into their room at all hours of the night with cuts and bruises.”

Jim rolls his eyes. “Okay, that was like four, maybe five times tops,” he says, carefully avoiding telling her about all the times she doesn’t know about, the times he wasn’t in fights and was just too lazy or tired or drunk to trudge across campus to the undergraduate dorms and had crawled into Bones’ bed like a second home instead. It’s nothing he’s ashamed of, really, because whose shitty idea was it to put the undergraduate dorms on the far side of campus anyways, but somehow it feels weird, admitting it out loud. “And I was drunk and I haven’t done that at all recently.” And then he adds after a beat, “And anyways, in my defense, someone needed to hit those guys.”

Gaila’s eyes are sharp and inquisitive as she studies his face. “Or perhaps,” she says, and he already knows he isn’t going to like what she says, “You needed someone to hit you?”

And no one gives her enough credit for it, because she’s an Orion and all anyone thinks when they look at her is that she must get her way because she uses her pheromones to her advantage, but Gaila is one of the most observant people Jim knows and somehow she’s always known without trying Jim’s tendency to self-destruct, his habit of seeking out fights just to remind himself that he’s real, and they don’t ever talk about it, not really, but that doesn’t stop her from bringing it up, just so, when she’s trying to make a point (only, Jim doesn’t quite get the point she’s trying to make, except that she’s making it and it’s struck a chord somewhere in his nerves anyways).

Their arrival at Bones’ combat class, which should just be wrapping up if Jim timed this right, saves Jim from having to answer Gaila’s question, and he just grins at her as they walk into the classroom and turns to scan the room for Bones. He manages to catch Bones’ eye from across the room and waves, just a little, feeling suddenly awkward. 

Bones motions for Jim to give him a second and turns to gather his things, pulling up the bottom of his shirt to wipe away a bead of sweat that’s gathered on his brow from class. The edge of the tattoo on his ribcage pokes out from under the raised hem of his shirt and Jim can just make out the raised white line running through it. He wonders, sometimes, why Bones never bothered to fix the scar. Is it a reminder of what’ll happen to him if he tries to love again? Is it a warning? Is it a penance?

Bones pauses when a classmate rests a hand on his arm and leans in to say something to him that makes him laugh, and Jim feels something harsh clench in his stomach. Next to him, Gaila makes a soft, appreciative sound. 

“He’s quite attractive,” she says softly, almost purring. 

Jim lets out a sharp breath. “I guess,” he says even as he acknowledges in his own head that the classmate Bones is talking to is objectively attractive, even if he’s not quite Jim’s type. Jim feels Gaila’s eyes on him but ignores her and instead calls out across the room, “Bones! You coming?”

Bones gives Jim a look (and Jim can almost hear it, _one second, Jesus, Jim_ ) and wraps up whatever conversation he’s having with that classmate and there are more smiles and laughs and a lingering hand on Bones’ arm as Bones says his goodbyes and starts walking over to Jim, and it occurs to Jim that he’s never seen Bones smile this much in such a short span of time to another person before. As Bones’ friend, Jim supposes he should feel glad that Bones is making more friends, that he’s finding it in himself to be light again, but that knowledge doesn’t diminish the heavy feeling in his gut. 

In the end, Jim supposes, he’s never really had someone he’d consider a best friend before, and he’s never had much practice sharing, anyways. 

\---

If the first year was the year that Bones went home for the holidays, then the second becomes the year that Bones seems just as homeless as Jim. Bones doesn’t talk about it and Jim doesn’t ask but Bones doesn’t talk about Georgia as much this year, doesn’t talk about the peach cobbler his grandma makes every year when all the McCoy cousins and aunts and uncles come over for Thanksgiving dinner, doesn’t bring up how he’s looking forward to riding his horse again, because he has a horse he left at home too when he ran away to find himself again in the ruins of his previous life. 

Instead, Thanksgiving creeps up on them amid exams and papers, and Bones doesn’t say anything, and then it’s two days before Thanksgiving and they’re holed up in Bones’ room, stacks of PADDs and study materials strewn all around them, and in the middle of taking a take-home exam for his immunology class with the clock ticking down, Bones looks up suddenly and he says: 

“What is there to do around here on Thanksgiving, anyways?”

 _A promise_ , Jim thinks, and it’s like his entire world lights up. He smiles. “Oh, I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

And they do, because the next day, Gaila tracks Jim down as he’s turning in the paper on interplanetary policy that he stayed up all night in Bones’ room writing, and she loops her arm through his and promises lots of liquor and a good time if he shows up at the party that she and Uhura are hosting, and that’s how he and Bones end up in Gaila and Uhura’s cramped double that Thursday evening, pressed elbow to elbow with people Jim recognizes – classmates from that databases class he and Gaila took together in their first year, people he’s met at the bar that many of the Starfleet cadets frequent, people he’s run into once or twice across campus – and people that Jim doesn’t, all of them shouting over loud music in the dimly lit room trying not to spill drinks that are too full and too strong but seem about right, in the end. 

Jim drinks and laughs and passes drinks to Bones all night and watches as Bones’ face flushes from the alcohol and all the bodies jostling each other here and there. Jim spends the night bothering Uhura about her first name, which just makes her laugh every time and tell him he needs to find a new hobby, and bullshitting with people he sort of knows and sort of doesn’t and watching Gaila flirt with Bones and Bones flirt back, his lazy southern drawl coming out full force in the wake of it, and Jim leans into Bones, pressed into him by the sheer number of people crammed into Gaila and Uhura’s room, and it’s warm and it’s nice. And when the crowd starts to thin out and someone suggests going out for drinks as a sort of afterparty, Jim enthusiastically agrees and drags Bones along with them, grumbling and all. 

In the bar, they end up crammed in a booth, and Bones’ thigh presses against his all night, his arm thrown over the back of the seat, pressing against the top of Jim’s back in the interest of saving room, and by the time they stumble back out into the night and towards campus, Jim feels chilled to the bone by the cold air outside after so many hours spent huddled up against Bones. They make their way back to campus and as Jim follows Bones to his dorm, Bones complains a little, half-heartedly, about never being able to enjoy his nice, big, full-sized bed all on his own, but he doesn’t stop Jim from coming into his room, at the end of it all. And while Jim just dives head first into the bed, only pausing to kick off his shoes, Bones rolls his eyes and undresses like he normally does and makes Jim chug at least half a huge glass of water before he lets Jim lie down again. 

Jim tugs the blanket up to his chin and watches as Bones stumbles drunkenly through his nightly routine, watching as Bones stubs his toe on at least three things trying to shove stuff away from his bed so he can sleep in peace, unbombarded by whatever he thinks will come for him if his belongings are too close to the bed. Finally, Bones flops down into the bed next to Jim, jostling him, and Jim whines and rearranges himself to make room for Bones and ends up being pressed snugly between Bones and the wall.

Bones is still but doesn’t sleep for a long while, his eyes half-lidded and soft but not completely shut, and Jim wonders if Bones is thinking about home and if he should say something. Instead, Jim reaches a hand out under the covers, nudging his fingers against Bones’ side. His index finger finds the scar on Bones’ side of its own accord, and part of Jim knows he should probably move it, but drunk and tired and on the verge of sleep, he can’t bring himself to do it. 

Bones shifts his eyes to find Jim in the dark. Jim smiles a little, even though he knows Bones might not be able to see him.

“Hey,” Jim says, his tongue feeling sluggish in his mouth. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you stayed. This was way more fun than last year.”

He probably means it more than he wants Bones to know, but he doesn’t really have that much control over what he’s saying anymore and all he knows is that he wants to stop whatever hurt is living in Bones’ chest. And anyways, Bones relaxes against his side a moment later, something easier and calmer slipping into his posture, and Jim thinks, it was probably worth it, whatever _it_ is. 

The last thing Jim hears before he slips off to sleep, hand still resting against Bones’ side like he thinks he can be some sort of anchor for a man no more put together than himself, is Bones murmuring, “Thanks, kid.”

And it all feels kind of okay after that.

\---

(It happens like that, most of the time, Jim stumbling in from off campus or a late night study session or a party too tired to get back to his own room, and he’ll crawl into Bones’ bed which is bigger than his but still sometimes too small because he learns that Bones likes to sleep sprawled across his entire bed, sometimes diagonally, almost always with a foot dangling off of the side of the bed.)

(Jim thinks about the stories that kids believe about monsters under the bed and the dangers of exposed limbs, and he thinks about Bones’ fears, the ones he barely talks about, the ones he lets slip – flying, helplessness, losing loved ones, dying where no one can hear him – and he watches Bones sleep, arms and legs invariably shoved out from under the blankets and over the edge of the bed and he thinks that he’s never quite met anyone like Bones before.)

(Jim sleeps, always, back pressed to the wall like he likes and Bones sleeps scooted right up to the edge of the bed like he likes and sometimes, still, despite their perfect symmetry, Jim wakes up tangled up with Bones.)

(There’s a way to get a queen sized bed, probably, especially if you’re hardheaded and determined and contrary like Jim, but neither of them have made the effort to figure it out. Better to maintain the status quo, they both figure, probably.)

\---

If you asked him, Jim would tell you that he’s not a jealous or territorial person. He’s never felt that strongly over anyone or anything and maybe that says something about how little he’s had in his life and how few people he keeps around, but it’s the truth, anyways, and it’s what he stands by. 

But then he goes to pick up Bones one day from work so they can go grab dinner, and when he gets there, Bones is already out and out of his scrubs and outside the infirmary, and he’s leaning against the wall and talking to that guy that Jim remembers from Bones’ combat class, and Bones is ducking his chin and laughing, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and Jim feels something ugly knot up in his gut, something unfamiliar and new, something almost hateful, something he immediately knows he doesn’t want to feel again. He watches as Bones leans ever so slightly more towards the guy to better hear something he says, and Jim feels himself frowning without meaning to. 

“Bones!” Jim shouts loudly, wondering if there’s something wrong with him for feeling oddly proud that it interrupts their conversation. 

Bones looks up from his conversation like he’s waking from a dream, the ghost of the wide-smiling laughter still coloring his face. And for a moment, they stand there, staring at each other, Bones’ warm smile fading with each second and Jim feeling the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, feeling guilty without knowing why. The look probably drags for too long, and then Jim tries for a smile and the moment breaks around them and leaves Jim feeling awkward and unsure in its wake.

“Jim,” Bones says in one long breath out like he’s deflating. 

Jim shoves his hands in his pockets and tries for a smile that feels out of place on his face. “Dinner?” he offers and he can feel the syllables clink around awkwardly in his mouth. 

“Um,” Bones says, like he forgot, or like he was too distracted to remember, and Jim isn’t sure which feels worse. “Right, gimme a sec, okay?”

And Bones leans in and says something to the guy that might be _Sorry about my friend_ and then _I’ll catch up with you later_ , and there’s that lingering hand on Bones’ arm again, and secret exchanged smiles like there’s something passed between them that Jim will never get. Bones turns then and meets Jim’s eye and Jim tries his best not to let the grimace that’s fighting its way to his face show. 

Bones lets out a breath as they fall into step with each other, leaving Medical and the bitter taste in Jim’s mouth behind. “So,” Bones says, “where to?”

Jim shrugs, finding himself less enthusiastic than when he set out about the whole thing. “There’s a good Ethiopian restaurant someone told me about,” he offers, hoping Bones will pick up the slack where he finds he suddenly can’t muster up the energy, hoping Bones won’t notice. 

“Sounds good,” Bones says, and then a moment later, sharp eyes assessing Jim’s face, “You okay, kid?”

And it’s times like this that Jim hates that Bones has learned to read other people’s hurts so well that even Jim, professional liar and put-er up of fronts, can barely squeak by. Jim smiles, shrugs, his best attempt at being casual about it all. 

“Fine,” Jim says over the top of a grin, and he sees something shift in Bones’ expression and can’t quite place what it is, just hopes that it passes for the truth, and it sits weirdly in his mouth because it should be the truth, and Jim almost believes it’s the truth, but it feels a little like lying anyways. Jim clears his throat, “So, you have a friend.”

Bones eyes Jim out of the corner of his eye and laughs, something soft and warm in a way that Jim feels like has nothing to do with him. “I’m allowed to have friends other than you, you know,” he says, maybe about halfway to defensive but still joking and light all the same like he’s trying not to start a fight, and Jim feels suddenly guilty that this is the emotion he’s eliciting.

Jim shrugs, tries to play it off as a joke. “Wasn’t sure if anyone could put up with all your complaining,” he says. 

Bones snorts and rolls his eyes. They walk in step with each other for a moment and then Bones says softly, like he’s revealing something precious and secret, “His name is Marcos. He’s in my combat class. He wants to be a communications officer.”

And it’s just a statement of fact and it shouldn’t be a big deal, but there’s something incredibly tender about the way Bones says it all and Jim feels the need to swallow the harsh feeling at the back of his throat before he speaks again. 

“So do you like him?” Jim asks, waggling his eyebrows and hoping that the teasing makes the odd feeling under his skin go away. 

Bones raises an eyebrow at Jim. “Do I ‘like’ him?” he says. “What are we, twelve? I don’t know; we spend time together. It’s fun. He’s nice.”

 _It’s fun. He’s nice._ Jim hears the words rattle around in his head over and over like too much loose change and he bites the inside of his cheek. Part of him, the part that’s reckless and violent and too rough still, too defensive from too many losses in so little time, that part of him wants to do something petty and stupid like lash out at a guy he’s never properly met, a guy who must be nice, by all accounts, a guy who makes Bones laugh so warmly that Jim almost forgets the memory of the disheveled man he met in Riverside. But the other part of him, the part that he’s found in himself again since showing up at Starfleet, the part that’s been dragged out of the long stasis that was his constant drunken brawls and one night stands in his effort to disappear a little more each day, that part of him knows it would be wrong and mean and petty to this Marcos to spite him. But the subject is making him uncomfortable and uncertain, worried he’ll do or say something he’ll later regret, so he takes the easy segue and crosses his fingers and hopes Bones doesn’t notice him steering them away from Marcos. 

“You’re not _that_ old,” Jim says. 

The corner of Bones’ mouth twists a little, just so, and he rubs at his side where Jim knows his ex-wife’s tattoo still lives, scar and all. Jim wonders if Marcos has a tattoo that marks Bones skin now, or if he will in the future, wonders where the tattoo would show up, wonders what it’d look like, wonders if Bones would tell Jim about it or if he’d have to find out about it on his own, and then Jim feels the sharp feeling pricking at his skin again and stops wondering. 

“I’m pretty old, Jim,” Bones grumbles and there’s the Bones Jim knows again, there’s the cynical grump who Jim knows beneath it all is just trying to make a little space for himself in the universe again. Bones lets out a breath and mutters, “Christ, I’m almost thirty.”

Jim grins then, all teeth and shining eyes, and Bones takes one look at him and says something like _If you’re thinking about doing something ridiculous for my thirtieth birthday, then so help me_ , and Jim just laughs, already working on a list of things Bones will need at his thirtieth birthday party, and they bicker all the way to the restaurant, and Jim almost forgets about the twisting feeling in his stomach enough to never give it a second thought. 

(Except at night sometimes, except when Jim is sleeping next to Bones and they end up pressed together and all too warm, except when sometimes Bones starts coming back to the room late, except when Bones just shrugs and says _I went out_ when Jim asks what held him up, except when Jim feels like some stupid, duped housewife and can’t figure out why because that isn’t what they are, that isn’t what they’ve ever been. Then, Jim thinks. Jim thinks a lot.)

\---

Jim finds himself thinking, despite his best intentions, that this year, somehow, Christmas doesn’t feel so pointless and frivolous. This year, Christmas doesn’t make him feel so lonely and untethered. Instead, in the days and weeks leading up to winter break, Jim feels the excitement from all the younger cadets bleed into him and it feels genuine this year instead of the forced smiles and too loud laughter that he drew out of himself last year. This year, it all feels real and he feels real. And he finds that it’s nice, being a real person. 

It helps, of course, that Bones stays around this year. Bones lingers and he doesn’t say as much, but Jim thinks that things probably haven’t warmed up very much for him in the past year and sometimes wonders if home will ever be home for Bones again or if this strange half-existence with nowhere to call his own is all that’s left for them, these lost souls that sign up to reach out into the great unknown because what lies behind is somehow more frightening. Bones lingers and he still has to work over break because he’s still a doctor first and everything else after, and he has deadlines to meet for his dissertation and paperwork to do at Medical, so Christmas Eve sees Jim bursting into Bones room late in the evening, minutes after Bones commed him to say he’s finally free from responsibilities. 

“Bones!” Jim cheers as he bounds into Bones’ room.

He catches Bones as he’s pulling on a clean shirt, and his eyes gravitate as always towards the tattoo on his side, and Jim can’t figure why he does this, studies Bones like he almost expects the tattoo to be gone the next moment, because he knows that’s now how this works, and it’s not like Bones doesn’t have other tattoos anyways – the circle on his right bicep, a dark smudge that Jim notices is new around his other arm that could be a new tattoo trying to take shape. Jim frowns and throws himself on Bones’ bed to avoid the questioning look he’ll no doubt get if Bones catches the downward turn to his mouth.

Jim rolls over into his back, propping himself on his elbows, and means to say something else entirely, but then he notices a couple boxes that he didn’t put under the little Christmas tree he got Bones again this year (can it be called a tradition, he’d wondered, if it’s only the second time he’s doing it?), and Jim perks up and asks, “Did Santa get you something?”

And Bones laughs and drops himself in his desk chair. “If by Santa, you mean my Grammy, then yeah,” he says. And then softly, “Got you something too.”

At this, Jim shoots straight up and lunges for the packages. One of them is addressed to him by name, _Jim Kirk_ , like they’re old friends, and in the return address, it reads _Elizabeth McCoy_ and an address in Georgia. Jim looks up from the package wide-eyed and slack-jawed. There had been a part of him, the part that learned from a young age to never expect love and kindness from anyone, the part that had things and people taken away from him again and again and again until there was just him and his hollow chest left, that truly believed that care packages from loved ones didn’t exist, that it was some elaborate hoax to make him feel left out and alone, but then there’s this, addressed to him, Jim, not James like he’s never liked to be called, and Jim’s entire world shatters around him and when he picks up the pieces, it’s a little brighter and better. 

Jim looks up at Bones, who’s watching him like he’s never seen Jim before, and then Jim has a sudden realization. “Your grandma knows about me,” Jim says, and when Bones shrugs sheepishly and looks away, Jim’s grin turns teasing. “Do you talk about me to your grandma?”

Bones makes a face and makes as if to snatch the gift back. “Well, I won’t anymore if you’re going to be like that,” he says, but he’s mostly joking. 

Jim holds the package firmly out of Bones reach. “Hey,” Jim says. “This is for _me_. Paws off or all you’re getting this year is coal.”

Bones rolls his eyes but slumps back in his seat and lifts his hands, palms out, in a show of defeat, the corner of his mouth turning up just a touch. Jim thinks about how long it’s been since he’s gotten this many gifts from people, even if this year it’s really just the two, one from Bones and one from Bones’ grandma, and his fingers itch to tear open the box and find out what’s inside, but it’s not Christmas proper yet, and anyways, they have plans, though Bones doesn’t know it yet. Jim places the box under the tree again, running a lingering finger over the edge of where two of the sides meet. 

“Feel like going out tonight?” Jim asks, and when Bones just shrugs in a sort of _depends on what do you have in mind_ way, Jim continues, “They’re having a party at the bar tonight, and a bunch of us were going to go. It’ll be fun – Gaila, Uhura, and Sora are going to be there and Rosa and Thao and Quincy from that class I taught this summer. _And_ they’re doing buy one get one peppermint patty shots till midnight.”

Bones lets out a laugh at that last bit. “You’re not getting me to do peppermint patty shots,” he says. “I’m not twenty anymore.”

But Bones goes out with Jim anyways and Jim badgers Bones into doing shots with him, complaints about getting old be damned, because it’s Christmas, and they’re both here this year, and Jim thinks that he’d just like to have one Christmas that doesn’t leave him feeling like complete shit. So they drink and Jim buys the kids from his combat class a round of drinks and he watches as Bones dances with Gaila and laughs and Jim doesn’t feel bad at all. He chats up Uhura, trying, always, to figure her out because he thinks she probably doesn’t think he’s as obnoxious as she acts like she does, because Jim wouldn’t bother her if he truly thought he was being a nuisance, and he plays wingman for Sora and by the end of the night, he’s drunk and loose and happy and leaning heavily against Bones as they stumble back to their room and it’s not until they’re crashing into the bed in a mess of limbs that Jim realizes that he didn’t even consider going back to his own room as an option ( _their room_ , he pulls out of the thoughts tumbling around in his head, _their room, their room, their room_ and can’t figure out what any of it means, in the grand scheme of things). He wonders as he nudges Bones’ knee away from jabbing into his thigh whether that makes him a really good friend or a really shitty one. 

They just lie there for a long moment, and Jim thinks about how light he feels, about the warm feeling filling him from his toes to the crown of his head, about the tingling in his fingertips like this is the first time he’s been fully aware of his whole body in a very long time, and he thinks of he could just find a way to come back to this moment every so often when his limbs feel too heavy to usher into any sort of movement, he’d probably be living a much better life. After a few minutes, Bones groans and shoves Jim away from him. 

“Get your elbows out of my ribs,” Bones grumbles and then sits up, running a hand through his hair. The movement leaves Bones hair sticking up at the front in odd angles, and Jim snorts. Bones frowns at him. “Don’t be rude or Santa’s going to take your presents away.”

And it’s the silliest thing he's ever heard Bones say, his tripping, drunk tongue making him sound more like a petulant child than a fully grown man, and Jim’s tired and drunk and has very little control over what he does or says, and laughter bubbles up out of his throat before he can stop it and before he knows it, he’s doubled over laughing and Bones is glaring at him and Jim just laughs harder until Bones shoves him and shoves him and shoves him off the bed in retaliation. Jim lets out a startled yelp as he hits the ground and stares up at Bones in feigned hurt. Bones frowns and then, after a moment, lets out a huff of a laugh. 

Bones hauls himself out of bed and gathers up the presents under the tree Jim got them. He dumps them on the bed and then wedges himself between the pillows and the wall, crossing his legs. He waits for Jim to scramble back up into the bed too and nudges Jim’s gifts towards him.

“Merry Christmas, Jim,” Bones says, and he’s all softness now, the frown lines gone from around his mouth.

Jim crosses his legs too and reaches for a package, realizing as he’s tearing open the gift that Bones’ grandma got him that he’s got this painfully wide smile on his face, and Jim can’t remember the last time he was this excited about receiving something from someone, not even when he was a kid. He rips the box open and then upends it, dumping its contents onto the bed, too jittery to take what’s inside out one at a time, and he doesn’t know what to expect from a friend’s grandma who he’s never met, but it’s not this. It’s not a hand knit sweater with a big ‘J’ on it like there’s a place he belongs in the world and a matching scarf and mittens and a stack of old books chronicling the early days of space travel that look worn and well-loved like many generations of cautious fingers have thumbed through its pages and little goodies too – chocolates and peppermints and a stack of credits to buy himself something nice if he wants – and there’s a handwritten note, written out in looping, elegant script. 

_Jim_ , it reads, _Leo tells me it’s your dream to go to the stars. Would you believe it if I told you that Leo’s great-granddaddy had the same dream? These books were Leo’s favorite to read with his great-granddaddy as a kid. Maybe you can coax that dream out of him again. I do hope you will visit us in Atlanta someday soon – Leo has told me so much about you and I think I’d like to meet the man who’s helped bring the real Leo back to me. Merry Christmas —Grammy M_

Jim holds the note in his hands with a certain reverence like it’s something precious and rare. His eyes keep getting caught on certain words and phrases – _Jim_ and _Grammy M_ like they’re familiar, the request to visit like there’s somewhere in the universe that actually wants him there, and Leo this and Leo that and Leo and Leo and Leo like this is who Bones was before he was Bones. Jim wonders how a woman he’s never met before can feel so special to him, wonders if this is how gently she treats a man she barely knows how she treats her grandson. Jim wonders, idly, if he ever will find himself in Atlanta at her house with Bones, or if this is just a pleasantry you’re expected to extend to what some would call your grandson’s best friend. 

Jim jerks his head up, realizing he’s been quiet and still for too long, but it must not have been as long as he thought, because Bones is still pulling pieces of his gifts out of his package from her. Jim carefully sets the note aside atop the stack of books she gave him and peers over at Bones’ box, wondering if this is how personal she’s able to get with someone she’s never met what kind of gift she got for her grandson.

“What’d you get?” Jim asks, an electric sort of excitement skipping over his skin. 

Bones shrugs and says, “The usual. Grammy loves her Christmas traditions.” 

But there’s a soft smile on Bones’ face like maybe he’s remembering happy Christmases from his childhood, opening his grandma’s gifts to him, and he’s got a sweater too, matching scarf and mittens and all, and all the little goodies Jim got – candies and credits. And he’s pulling out now holos from home and when he switches them on, they light up to show different pieces of Bones’ life that Jim’s never seen before – him and his father picking peaches and laughing; him riding his horse, braced low to get up to speed; him helping his grandmother cook in the kitchen as various little nieces and nephews run about. Jim stares, wide-eyed at the slivers of Bones that he never got to meet, that he may never meet, and thinks that home for him was never a home like this. Bones’ grandma sent him some books too, only his look more like old journals, leather-bound and aged, and Bones draws in a sharp breath as he takes them out of the box. 

“These were my dad’s,” he says softly. “He—A lot of the McCoys liked to keep old-fashioned journals. Something about there being something to writing it all down by hand.” He’s quiet for a moment and then, on a breath out like an almost laugh, “Figures, I guess.”

Jim frowns. “Hm?” 

Bones looks up and sets the journals gently aside like he doesn’t want to lose them. “I decided not to go home this year,” he says quietly, almost guiltily. “This is her way of reminding me why home’s still worth going back to, I guess.”

And it’s not the part that Jim’s meant to be paying attention to, he knows, but his thoughts catch on the fact that Bones _chose_ not to go home. When Bones had stayed for the holidays, Jim just assumed that it was because his grandfather had repeated his hostility from last year and that Bones almost wasn’t allowed to return, and it’s not like, at the heart of it all, Bones chose Jim and Starfleet and San Francisco over home, but there’s something that feels oddly nice about it all. That Bones decided to stay. That Bones thought of Jim and Starfleet and San Francisco and thought that it was a good enough reason to stay.

And it means something, probably, but Jim is still a little too drunk and too blissed out on having what feels like a real Christmas for the first time since he was a kid to really give it much thought. He’ll figure it out in the morning, he figures. There’s always time for it later. 

\---

The end of the year leaves Jim feeling warm and light and almost safe for the first time in a long time, and it’s Jim’s biggest gripe with the universe that his birthday follows so closely behind the holiday season, because the new year rolls in and it’s like all of a sudden, someone threw a damp rag on any brief happiness Jim’s managed to find. This year finds Jim far from his usual haunts, something about the usual scene leaving a bitter taste in his mouth after a surprise call from his mother. She happened to be planetside, she’d said, and thought she’d call to check in. She’d said something about hearing through the grapevine that he’d joined Starfleet and she’d wanted to say congrats and happy birthday besides. And it’s almost painful talking to her sometimes, because she talks to him like she talks to everyone else, polite and not unkind, but perfunctory and distant, like they’re basically strangers and she’s just reading from a script about how to be a mother. Jim supposes in a way that they are basically strangers, because as long as he can remember, she’s taken every excuse to go back out into the black and left him with a string of relatives and friends and finally, the godawful excuse for a step-father her second husband was. And in his more rational moments, Jim knows it’s not her fault, mostly, that the trauma of her husband, his father, dying the way he did changed her as a person, because he knows firsthand that this is what trauma does, that it sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let go, that it leaves you warped and mangled around the edges, but it still leaves him feeling bitter and angry and a little petty all the same. 

This year finds Jim hiding all day on one of the chilly beaches not too far from campus, ending the day by tending to an illegal bonfire stoked by the remainders of a past that’s his and not his at the same time. He rips up page after page of a thick manuscript entitled _The Sacrifice of the USS Kelvin: A Simulation of its Final Moments_ and feeds them into the fire one at a time, feeling petulant and spiteful, angry that a part of his past he’ll never really know belongs to all the people who’ve seen and read it, angry that the moment of his birth is something he will never overcome. 

This year, it takes Bones just shorter to find him than last year, the sound of his shoes crunching against the sand hitting Jim’s ears just before midnight. Jim wonders if this means he’s become too predictable, too easy, or if it just means that Bones has gotten to know him better. He’s not sure why that thought sits oddly in his mouth. 

Bones sits down next to Jim, pulling his knees up and resting his elbows on them, and Jim half expects Bones to tell him to stop, to pull the paper out of his hands and ask why Jim bothered to print out so much in paper when he was just planning on throwing it away. But Jim supposes he should stop expecting Bones to treat loss the same way that others Jim has known do, because Bones, too, has known loss and Bones, too, knows that recovering from it is never so simple or logical. 

After a moment, Bones lets out a low whistle. “Christopher Pike,” he reads from the upper corner of the pages, where the name is stamped in clean, all-caps letters. “He was at Riverside, right?”

Jim nods and keeps throwing page after page into the fire, unable to coax himself to do anything else but repeat the same movements over and over and over – rip, crumple, throw. Jim sometimes thinks about the person he’s afraid he is when everything else is stripped away, when he doesn’t have grades to make or projects to finish or goals to surpass. He thinks about who he is when he has nothing to do but think and sometimes, he thinks he hates himself a little bit. 

“He wrote his dissertation on the Kelvin,” Jim mumbles, and there’s a little part of him, that little anxious flutter in his stomach, that hates saying the name of the ship, because it’s like saying it makes it real every time, like it and everything that followed could almost be a dream or a story otherwise. Jim frowns and throws a wad of paper at the fire perhaps too viciously. He sits for a moment and then starts again, “Did you know he wrote the most thorough account of the destruction of the USS Kelvin to date? Spent years doing research, interviewing everyone he could, extracting data from the shuttles. He even talked to my mom, not that she ever told me that.”

Jim can’t help the bitter twist to his words as they come out of his mouth as he talks about his mother and immediately regrets it, immediately knows the race of thoughts that must be going through Bones’ mind, immediately wants to get up and run again so Bones won’t find him. He’s never talked about his mother to anyone. Sometimes, he thinks he might be afraid that talking about her will make her too real too.

Bones hums softly, acknowledging but not prying or pushing, and sometimes Jim marvels at Bones’ seemingly endless patience, given the right motivation. Jim thinks, absently, that Bones must’ve been a great father, being so patient with someone so fragile. 

“She called me today,” Jim blurts out before he loses his nerve, because he remembers his last birthday, remembers Bones’ generosity, giving Jim the big ups and downs of his life so Jim wouldn’t have to think about his own, because Jim remembers and remembers clamming up every time Bones has so much as hinted at Jim’s birthday since and feels like maybe he’s never learned how to be a good friend. “She never calls me.”

Next to him, Bones shifts slightly. “Well, that’s good isn’t it?” he asks gently, almost like he’s treading on eggshells. “That she called you? That’s nice of her.”

Jim lets out a bark of a laugh that feels rough in his throat. “Bones, you don’t get it, she _never_ calls me,” he says, and he knows he sounds mean and spiteful and just hopes that Bones doesn’t think it’s directed at him. He pauses a moment and then shoulders on, staring at the fire until he starts to see spots, “I barely ever saw her, even as a kid; she was always running away to space. And even when I did see her, it was always just ‘how have you been’ and ‘what have you been up to’ instead of anything real. Nothing’s ever fucking real with her.”

Bones hums again, quietly like he’s considering all of this carefully. “Jim,” he says gently, like he’s worried if he speaks too loudly, he’ll shatter Jim entirely, “She lost her husband not minutes after you were born. That can’t have been easy for her, even now.”

Jim huffs out a sharp breath. “I know,” Jim says, perhaps too harshly, because he knows, maybe too deeply and too well, and it makes it just that much harder, because he can’t blame her, because he knows that he’s his mother’s son at the end of the day and he does just the same, closes people out when the world gets too much and too loud and too often. “Christ, of course I know. I know losing loved ones doesn’t just leave you, but it’s like, I don’t know, she’s my mom.”

And Jim wants to explain that he honestly gets it, he really does, that she would find it so hard to be tender after shattering so fully, that she wouldn’t remember how to be someone warm or gentle enough to be a parent, because sometimes he feels like that too, like he doesn’t remember how to be a real person. Jim wants to explain that there’s a part of him, a big part of him, that wants to be sympathetic, that feels her hurt too, but there’s also a part of him, maybe a bigger part of him, that’s grown barbed and misshapen in her absence, with no solid ground to stand on, and he tries not to care about it, most of the time, either for his benefit or hers, because it’s easier that way, makes his complicated and messy life just a hair less so. But it’s his birthday and Jim’s gotten so tired over the years, and he wants to explain that he knows it’s petty of him, but he just wants to feel like he has a family left, even if that’s mostly a lie. 

Instead, Jim just says weakly, “I just wish she’d talk to me. I wish she’d just try.”

Bones shifts again next to him, and Jim can almost feel Bones thinking, gathering up the loose threads and finding the pattern in them to say something about. “Maybe she has,” he says, not pushing, just offering without judgment. “Maybe this is the best she can do. I know after my dad died, I was a pretty shit dad. I don’t blame the courts for taking Joanna way from me, even if I am upset about it. Sometimes the shit that happens to us changes who we can be to people.”

And Jim thinks _But it didn’t change you_ , even though he knows as he thinks it that he has no right to, that he didn’t know Bones before, that he can never know what about him changed and what didn’t, but Jim looks at him now, a man with almost as little family as Jim left, a man with almost the same scars just in different shapes, and the only person Jim can see is someone who cares so much and so deeply that Jim can’t imagine him any other way. And maybe Bones wasn’t always this prickly, maybe he wasn’t always this cynical, but Jim can’t help thinking that the gentleness must’ve been there all along. Jim thinks about this and thinks about his mother and thinks _Why couldn’t she, too, have been like this_ , thinks _Why couldn’t she have been more the person I needed her to be_ , and Jim remembers, vaguely, being a kid and scrambling into her lap or bringing her a toy to play with in the brief stretches of time she was home and he thinks he remembers that she used to look at him, always, like she was on the verge of breaking. And Jim thinks that maybe Bones is right, in the end. 

“I know,” Jim says even though knowing it doesn’t make it sting less. Tomorrow, he’ll be better rested and less mopey and the entire universe won’t be staring at him, waiting for him to make a move, to live up to his father or burn out spectacularly. Tomorrow, he’ll feel more forgiving and less bitter, and he’ll probably try to call his mom again and maybe see if she’s nearby and free and wants to get coffee. But today, it’s his birthday, it’s the day his father died, it’s the day he’ll probably never learn how to grapple with, and he feels all the ugly things he tries to keep locked up within himself rearing up and trying to get out, because he’s so tired and so lonely sometimes, and it feels good, every now and again, to not have to fight against himself. “I know, Bones. My mom and I – we’re the same person that way, I think. And I think that’s why it’s so hard, because I’ve done the same thing she has, but I just—I just want, sometimes, to feel like I actually have a family left. She’s all I have, Bones. What am I supposed to do?”

And there’s a long moment, and the only sound between the two of them is the dying hisses of Jim’s fire and the flapping of the pages of the half-forgotten manuscript in the breeze. Bones just sits next to Jim, and Jim almost believes that maybe Bones won’t say anything. Maybe this is Bones’ gift to him; just letting him air all the nasty parts of himself without any fear of judgment. Maybe that’s enough, Jim thinks, maybe that’s all he needs. 

“You have me,” Bones offers finally, quietly, an offering. “I’m not going anywhere, kid.”

Bones reaches for the manuscript that Jim has left lying by his feet and rips off a sheet of paper. He crumples it into a sort of tube of paper and prods at the remains of the fire with it, blowing at the embers to get them to catch again. He says nothing else that night and Jim doesn’t either, and they sit side by side feeding the far too picked over public spectacle that passes for Jim’s history into the flames, and Jim thinks that maybe this is Bones’ way of promising. 

\---

In the spring, Jim feels something nipping at his heels, starts hearing whispers in the back of his head that he’s done enough growing and now might be about time to try to prove that he’s learned something, and signs up for the Kobayashi Maru. 

Bones tells him he’s crazy when he comes back to the room that day and tells Bones what he’s done. 

Bones tells Jim he’s crazy when Jim reads up on strategy and diplomatic treaties and the test itself. 

Bones tells Jim he’s crazy as Jim declares that he’s going to be the first person to beat the test, that the test may have been designed to be unwinnable but the test has never met Jim, and Bones tells him and tells him and tells him, tells him that cadets who are more experienced and more advanced than Jim have failed this test many times over, tells him that unwinnable means unwinnable and as clever as Jim is, that’s that. Bones tells him all of this, every day, without fail, but then goes along with it all the same when Jim makes him volunteer to be a part of the bridge crew, and Jim doesn’t say as much, but he thinks that it would’ve been strange to even pretend to captain a ship without Bones there somewhere. 

Jim fails the test. Later that evening, Bones buys him a drink, and they laugh about it, laugh about what a ridiculous tradition it is to put cadets through a test that’s meant to fail everyone who comes through, laugh about how the Starfleet professors probably get a good kick out of seeing so many cadets flounder their way through the simulation, and by the end of the night, Bones stops telling Jim he’s crazy. 

“I’m going to take it again,” Jim says as they tumble into bed that night, all loose limbs and uncoordinated jostling from the drinks and the laughter. “I’m going to take it again and I’m going to win.”

Bones snorts and Jim catches him rolling his eyes as they walk back into the dorm together, but Bones doesn’t fight him, his silence steadfast like when Jim said that he was going to captain the USS Enterprise, like when Jim said Bones was going to be his CMO, like he can tell that all Jim is thinking about is that he’s going to take the goddamn Kobayashi Maru again and again and again until he succeeds and there’s nothing and no one in the entire universe who can stop him. 

\---

The thing Jim doesn’t realize is that, over the course of this school year, he’s all but moved in with Bones, and it’s not until his foreignness in Bones’ room is thrown in his face that it throws him back into his body. It’s an unseasonably warm day in the spring, and Jim’s just going back to Bones’ room after a day of classes, juggling his books and a package, and he’s going through the messages he’s received over the course of the day, finding amongst them a thank you to a birthday note Jim wrote Bones’ grandma because if she got him Christmas presents then it only feels right to do the little things for her. He punches in Bones’ door code without looking up because he knows it by heart by now and he all but busts in, ready to drop everything he’s carrying into a pile by the door and change out of his regulation reds and into something more comfortable. 

But then Jim walks in and he notices the abrupt silence of a conversation interrupted, and he looks up from checking his messages and almost drops everything he’s carrying on his feet, because Bones is there with that guy – Marcos – and they’ve both got those fading smiles of a joke half-finished, half-laughed at, and Jim feels it like a kick in the gut that he’s so out of place suddenly in this room that’s his without being his, that he feels like _he’s_ the outsider and not this stranger he’s only ever seen from a distance. 

“Um,” Jim says at the same time Bones says in a surprised breath out, “Jim.”

Jim clears his throat and sets down what he’s holding as gently as he can. He smiles, feels where the skin pulls awkwardly. 

“Sorry, didn’t realize you had company,” he says.

Marcos looks at Bones and then at Jim and then back at Bones. “Your roommate?” he asks. 

And Bones’ eyes haven’t left Jim since he walked in, like Bones is studying Jim’s face for something Jim can’t figure out. “My friend, Jim,” Bones says like his attention isn’t really on what he’s saying. He nods towards Marcos, still looking at Jim like he expects Jim to do something. “Jim, this is Marcos.”

Marcos stands from where he’a sitting on the bed and the bottom of his pant leg drops to cover the wide band of dark ink circling his ankle. Jim frowns. Marcos takes a couple of steps and extends a friendly hand, nothing but congenial, nothing but polite and friendly, but Jim’s limbs feel stiff and heavy as he goes to shake Marcos’ offered hand anyways. 

“Nice to meet you,” Jim says and wonders why his voice sounds so foreign to his own ears. He gestures around vaguely, “Sorry to bother you. I’ll just, uh—” Jim scoops up a couple things of his lying around Bones’ room, not really paying attention to what he’s grabbing, just satisfying whatever niggling thought in the back of his head that’s telling him he needs to think up an excuse to be here, so he doesn’t seem so out of place, and he looks up at Bones again, “You got a package from Grammy, by the way.”

Bones nods, something distant and speculative still coloring his expression. “Thanks,” he says. 

Jim nods, too, and hears himself say something like _Nice meeting you_ to Marcos again and mumbling something about places he has to be or people he has to see, trying to feel less lame, and when he stumbles out of the room, still dressed in his cadet reds, and the door slides shut behind him, he feels himself physically deflate. Jim looks down at his hands, the jacket and one of Bones’ PADDs and a left shoe he managed to grab in his blind scramble, and wonders why he feels so lost and betrayed. Because Bones is allowed to have friends, and he’s allowed to see people he’s interested in because it’s none of Jim’s business and Jim should be happy for him besides because that’s what friends do, and it bothers Jim for the rest of the day, because he thought he was getting better at this friend thing. And it bothers him because the only person he’d want to talk about this with is the one person he can’t because he’ll probably never find the right words to describe the knot in his gut in a way that won’t make Bones hate him. 

\---

Jim sees a lot more of Marcos that spring – laughing with Bones over coffee, exchanging glances at they walk to and from classes, eating meals together without Jim. He never quite runs into Marcos face to face again after that first day except in passing – dropping Bones off at Medical, meeting Bones after a class, crossing paths while running errands across campus. Jim spends a lot of time wondering if this is by design or if he’s just reading too much into things. 

Jim notices as the spring wears on that the smudge of dark ink on Bones’ left bicep still sometimes peeks out from under the sleeve of his t-shirt on the few days he wears them, and sometimes Jim could swear it’s getting darker and sharper, like it’s trying to take shape. But Bones keeps tugging his shirt sleeves down and looks away when Jim notices, and Jim never quite finds it in him to ask about it, because every time he thinks to, his voice gets lost in his throat. Is that how it happens, he thinks, do tattoos always fade into existence this way or do you just wake up one day and find something new on your body? Do you just wake up one day and look down at yourself and go _Oh, I guess I’m in love_ and that’s that? Jim watches Bones out of the corner of his eye sometimes and wonders, _Is that what’s happening? Is Bones falling in love? When will he realize? How do you know?_

Jim wants to ask Bones, but can’t. Jim wants to ask Bones, who has loved so much and so deeply, who Jim keeps seeing rubbing at the spot on his arm as often as he rubs at the spot on his side, who Jim worries over without knowing why. Jim wants to ask Bones, but ends up asking Gaila instead, Gaila who won’t stop picking at her own new emerging tattoo, who’s the only person Jim knows who’s gone at it again and again and again without fail and with so much enthusiasm. He watches her, sometimes, the many swirls and patterns of ink peeking out from under shirts and dresses, all of them pristine and unblemished, and he wonders how she can be so optimistic. 

“How do you do it?” he finally asks her one day, and he really just came to find her to get help on a project he has due in a few days, but she keeps picking at the new impression on her wrist and he’s been thinking about this for weeks besides. 

Gaila looks up at him, blinks. “Do what?” she says, straightening from where she’s hunched over her desk next to him trying to see what she can help him with.

“You know,” Jim says and gestures weakly at her many tattoos. There’s a new girl, Jim knows, an off-worlder though he hasn’t quite figured out where she’s from, and he notices the way that Gaila keeps checking, every day, to see if the tattoo on her wrist has taken a definitive shape yet. “You’re seeing someone new after all of this.” – and here Jim gestures again, vaguely – “How could you possibly still want to do that?”

Gaila looks at Jim, her eyes soft and speculative. She looks at him like this sometimes, like he’s a sad lost animal to be sheltered from the world, and Jim doesn’t quite know what she must think of him. Gaila laughs, quietly, a little sadly.

“Can I ask you something?” she says instead of answering him directly.

Jim jerks back a little, surprised. “Uh, yeah, sure,” he says. 

Gaila takes a breath and leans back in her seat, rolling her shoulders back a little. She tilts her head and says, “Is it that you believe that you choose not to love or that it just hasn’t happened for you yet?”

Jim frowns. “I—” he says and then stops. “What do you mean I ‘believe’? I do choose. I don’t want to fall in love; I’ve never wanted that.”

Gaila hums softly. She runs her finger over her new tattoo again. “Never wanted or never let yourself want?” she asks, like she’s trying to get at something Jim’s too dense to see.

Jim furrows his eyebrows and shakes his head. “What?”

Gaila sighs and smiles at him, gently. “Jim,” she says, and it’s that tone she gets when she really probably does think his life has been a little sad and bleak, even with everything she’s been through. “Love either happens or it doesn’t. There’s no choosing involved. If you’re not disposed to falling in love, then you won’t, of course, but if you’re like me and you do experience romantic love, then it’s very difficult to opt out, I think. And you’re skeptical, I know, but Jim, it’s not like in the stories or those old human fairytales. You don’t just see a person and go ‘oh’ most of the time. It happens over time. And there’s very little you can do to stop it.”

Jim lets out a laugh of disbelief that’s not entirely on purpose. “Gaila, I’ve gone twenty-four years without falling in love,” he says. “It’s not going to happen.” He pauses and then adds, without knowing why, just feeling defensive and like he has something to prove, “And besides, it’s not like I don’t have people who I care about. It’s just not like that. It’s not tattoo-worthy.”

Gaila looks at him like she’s trying to pick apart something he doesn’t even think exists within himself. “Are you sure?” she asks. “How would you know? You’ve never let yourself identify something as romantic love before.”

And she’s not mean about it, just matter-of-fact, and it’s usually one of his favorite qualities about her, that she has so little regard for the pleasantries that send people talking in circles instead of just saying what they mean, but it catches him off balance and suddenly Jim feels like the room is spinning around him. 

“Well, how are you supposed to tell?” he asks her. “What am I supposed to be looking for, anyways?”

Gaila shrugs. “A tattoo’s a start,” she offers, and it’s not in that tone that sometimes people get with Jim for not finding love yet. There’s no _Well of course it’s obvious to everyone who’s not emotionally stunted like you_ hidden in it, and Jim thinks this is why it’s maybe so much easier to talk to Gaila than almost anyone else. “But as for what you feel, only you can know that.”

And all Jim can think is _How can something be worth fighting for if you can’t tell that you even have it?_

\---

It should probably come as no surprise that Jim is still, _still_ after so many months trying to be better, trying to make himself a little more into the person he wishes he could be, the best at fucking up everything good in his life. It’s the last couple days of the final exam period, and Jim’s already breezed through his exams for this term and he gets bored and antsy within a day. Bones is still in the middle of it all and working and coming back to the room at odd hours of the night, the room that Jim only lives in half the time now, maybe not even quite that often, the room he feels unwelcome in sometimes, and Jim has spent almost the entirety of final exam period in his own room, listening to Sora snore every night. And it probably shouldn’t feel weird, spending so much time in his own room, but it does and he doesn’t sleep well.

Jim has barely seen Bones all of finals, just a conversation here and there between study sessions and scheduled exams which mostly consisted of complaining about work, and one time when Jim got coffee for Bones when he knew that Bones had a progress report deadline to submit to his dissertation committee, and a time Jim saw Bones across the quad by the grad student dorms handing off a large bag to Marcos. And Jim finds himself feeling restless and lonely in a way that he hasn’t felt in over a year and it’s probably a dangerous thing, giving into the impulses that get kicked up when he’s like this, because he knows better, he does, and he likes to claim that he’s moved on from the recklessness of his time in Iowa, but when someone invites him out to go celebrate the end of another school year, he finds himself agreeing anyways. They go out to a bar that night, and he drinks, a lot, more than he should, past the point where he knows he should stop, and he stays at the bar past the point where everyone else he came here with is gone, fingertips itching for a fight. He picks a fight the first chance he gets, and walks away the winner with a split lip and what will probably be a black eye tomorrow and he hates that he still gets a sense of guilty satisfaction from fights like this, like he’s still just trying to be a nobody from Iowa with too much trapped in him to just sit still, like he hasn’t grown or changed since then. By the time he stumbles back to campus, it’s late and his ears are ringing a little and he’s sent Bones a number of unanswered comms to come join them, to stop being such a killjoy for once in his life and he looks up to find himself at Bones’ dorm even though he meant to go back to his own room tonight like he has been. 

Part of Jim, at the back of his head, the rational part of him, the sober him, tells him he should just go home, because it’s too late and Bones still has finals to finish anyways, but the part of Jim that’s shouting the loudest, as ever, is the part that’s telling him to go, get up there and kick up a fuss like the pettiest part of himself desperately wants to, his pulse still pounding with fight. And it’s stupid and reckless but Jim has always been stupid and reckless, so he marches right up to Bones’ room and punches in the door code he still knows by heart despite not having been here pretty much at all for the last few weeks, and there’s a part of him, a part of him he probably doesn’t like very much, that takes a little bit of satisfaction that he makes such a noisy entrance. 

“Bones!” Jim shouts as he teeters into the dark room. He waves his hands around as if that will help, “Lights on.”

The sudden glare of the bright lights leaves Jim seeing spots for a moment or two, and he blinks frantically, trying regain his bearings again. “Bones!” Jim cheers again, seeing Bones curled up amongst his blankets, and he can feel the brittleness of his voice in his mouth, the forced brightness, the petty meanness hiding just around the edges. 

Bones groans and pushes himself up in his bed, rubbing at his eyes. He frowns at Jim, his eyebrows pulling into a scowl. “Jim, what the hell?” he grumbles, his voice coming out low and raspy from sleep. Then he squints at Jim, sees the marks on his face, and asks, “What happened?”

Jim makes a show of spinning to look around the room, unbalanced and stumbling in the wake of it, dizzy and drunk and uncoordinated. “You decent?” he asks, decidedly not answering any of Bones’ questions. 

Bones sits, his legs dangling over the edge of the bed and the blankets pooled around his waist. His hair is sticking up at odd angles like it always is when he wakes up and he has creases from the bedsheets pressed into his cheek. On any other day, Jim thinks, this would be such a normal sight, Bones just waking up and slightly grumpy for it. But it’s not any other day and Jim hasn’t really seen Bones in what feels like forever, and Bones is frowning at him like Jim is stepping too far in the wrong direction. Jim knows he should stop and go back to his room, leave now and chalk it up to drunken stupidity in the morning before he breaks something he can’t fix, split lip and black eye be damned, or else suck it up and just go to the infirmary like everyone else, but if there’s one thing Jim’s always got, it’s inertia and now that he’s here, he feels rooted and determined and he hates it, a little bit. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Bones says. He scrubs a hand over his face and lets out an exasperated sigh. “Jim, I have a final in the morning. I need to sleep.”

Jim shrugs and keeps looking around Bones’ room like he expects to find something or someone. “You alone?” Jim asks.

Bones stares at Jim wandering around his room like Jim’s lost his mind. “Yeah, I’m alone, what about it?” he says, the low rumble in his voice turning impatient and annoyed. “Jim, seriously. I haven’t slept at all the past couple days; I really need one night’s sleep before tomorrow’s exam. Either tell me what you want or leave. Go to Medical. I don’t have time for this right now.”

 _Leave_ , like Jim doesn’t belong here, _Go to Medical_ , like Jim’s an annoyance to be rid of, which is a ridiculous thought, of course, and sober Jim would totally get it and not take offense because it’s still technically finals period and Jim doesn’t blame Bones for wanting some sleep before an exam, especially since Jim knows how hard Bones has been working, _knows_ how little sleep he’s been getting, but as it is, the words jangle around Jim’s head, bouncing around like he’s hollow and empty, and he just feels like the old Jim again, lonely and useless and acting out because he’s always been better at talking with his fists than his voice. 

So instead of listening, Jim just smiles and feels how nasty it must look, feels the skin pull around his cut, tastes blood in his mouth again. “Just thought Marcos might be around,” he says. “I’ve seen so much of him lately, probably more than I’ve seen you.”

And the little part of Jim that is better than this, at his core, hopes that Bones knows that this is the worst part of him, this is all the ugliness he’s kept a tight lid on for so long, that this is all the bitter feelings that have been stewing for months, that Jim doesn’t really mean anything he’s saying. He hopes that Bones knows that he’s just being petty and stupid and reckless like he always is, acting first and thinking later, and he knows that doesn’t excuse behavior like this but he also hopes that Bones knows that no part of Jim truly wants to hurt him. 

Bones jerks back like he’s been hit, and his expression darkens from annoyance to something more like anger. “What the _hell_ , Jim,” he says again and this time it comes out more as a low hiss.

Jim thinks that maybe he really does hate himself, at the end of the day, and that’s why he tends to do this, lash out to drag people into the shit with him, because the hurt has to go somewhere and Jim doesn’t know what to do with it other than send it out into the world and watch his life crumble around him.

“What?” Jim says, a voice in his head shouting _no, no, no stop, stop now while you’re ahead, don’t make this worse_ , but Jim’s mouth is moving faster than he can think and there’s probably no stopping it now. “He’s here like all the time, isn’t he? It’s why I never see you anymore, right?”

“You know damn well that isn’t why,” Bones snaps. He stands, angry, and steps towards Jim like he’s trying to box him out. His bare chest is broad and the dark impression of a tattoo trying to form on his left bicep is darker now than when Jim last saw it and Jim feels harsh and small. Bones narrows his eyes at Jim and demands, “Why the hell are you trying to pick a fight with me?”

Jim raises his hands in an exaggerated show of good faith. “I’m not,” Jim says, even though in his heart of hearts he knows that he is, because there’s too much in him. His mother had said once (this rare memory that Jim has of her actually being something like a mother to him, this rare memory that he keeps locked away inside himself because it’s maybe the only time he can remember feeling truly warm) that he’d been born a survivor, that he’d inherited all his father’s fight, and it’s probably true, but instead of making something of it like she’d probably pictured, he spends all his fight doing petty things, getting into bar brawls, chasing his friends away. “I’m just saying you seem to have plenty of time for Marcos but not me anymore, but you know, whatever.”

Jim sees something flash across Bones’ face, something sharp, something almost antagonistic, and Jim almost grins, wanting a fight, hating that he wants this. But then Bones speaks, and his voice is quiet and tired and he says, “We broke up. Is that what you want from me?”

And it’s like it punctures a hole in Jim’s skin and all the air in his body rushes out and any thrill in his body leaks out with it. There’s a certain satisfaction that Jim gets from picking fights sometimes, the surge of adrenaline, the knowledge that he can and always has won, the relief of getting out of his own head even for a brief few moments, but Jim feels none of that now. Instead, as Bones runs a hand through his hair and turns back to collapse back into his bed, the hurt written clearly on his bare skin and his slumped shoulders, Jim just feels like he’s been hollowed out and gutted. 

“Get out, Jim,” Bones says as he slips back into bed and yanks the blankets up over him. He doesn’t meet Jim’s eyes and somehow, this hurts more than Bones yelling at him would’ve. “I can’t deal with you right now.”

Bones turns the lights off without waiting for Jim to move or respond, and Jim stands there in the dark for a long moment feeling like the worst person in the universe. His lip still stings from the cut in it and he can already feel his black eye starting to form, and all he wants to do right now is apologize, find some way to put the shattered bits of his life back together in a way that still makes sense, but he doesn’t know how to put it into words, has never known how, so he just stands for a long time, feeling stupid and guilty, before he turns to leave. Jim’s easily able to find his way to the door in the dark without running into anything like this space is his too, and he should probably be glad that he doesn’t have a stubbed toe or knee to add to the things that hurt right now, but he just feels shittier instead.

\---

Jim doesn’t see Bones at all for three days. He considers sending Bones a comm as a peace offering, wanting to tell Bones everything he can’t find it in him to say, that he’s needy and possessive, probably, and didn’t learn that about himself till now because he’s never had anyone to be needy and possessive over, that when he feels like shit his first instinct is to bring everyone around him down with him, but every time he goes to message Bones, he gets a sick feeling in his gut like he’s going about everything wrong. What if Bones doesn’t want to talk with him? What if his message goes ignored? Better to give Bones space than to risk spinning out entirely, right?

Three days later, final exam period has ended and Jim’s eating lunch in the dining hall with Sora, which mostly consists of Sora gossiping about did you know so-and-so hooked up with so-and-so and Jim glaring at his soup, not really hungry at all but determined to finish. He’s just thinking that maybe he fucked up by not messaging Bones because he hasn’t heard so much as a peep from Bones since that night and he’s just thinking maybe he should do something about it instead of just sitting and waiting like a lost little boy when a tray drops down beside him. Jim looks up and he finds Bones sitting down next to him, and Jim could swear he feels his heart leap into his throat, something thrilling and electric running down his skin. Bones meets Jim’s eyes and Jim can see that he’s tired, the lines around his eyes more prominent, bags visible beneath his eyes, and there’s something more guarded about Bones’ face than Jim remembers from before, but Bones slides a cup of coffee over to Jim and it feels like the peace offering Jim couldn’t bring himself to make. 

There are so many things Jim wants to say, starting with _I’m sorry_ and ending somewhere close to _I don’t deserve you_ , but he finds that nothing quite sits right in his mouth, so he just takes the coffee from Bones and takes a long sip. Two sugars and just a splash of milk, just how he likes it. Jim smiles and feels a little awkward and wants to say something, but Sora’s still sitting across the table from him talking about who knows what, and there are things, Jim thinks, that he probably doesn’t want the whole world to know. So Jim just smiles and the corner of Bones’ mouth turns up as well, and Jim thinks, well, it’s a start.

(Later, a few days later, when the events from that night have faded into a dull simmer at the back of Jim’s mind, Jim finds himself in Bones’ room in Bones’ bed again, his face pressed up against sheets that smell like Bones’ shampoo for the first time in a long time and he finds himself thinking that it feels a little like coming home.) 

(Jim thinks about what it means to belong somewhere, to be comfortable in your own skin, to never doubt or worry, and decides right then and there that he never wants to fuck it up for himself again, decides that he’s going to be a better person and this time he’s actually going to make it count.) 

(Jim thinks about belonging and forgiveness and his fingers find Bones’ side, just brushing against the scar without meaning to, and he mumbles, _Bones, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry_ over and over and over again, and he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that the feeling he’s got at the base of his throat is the inexplicable urge to cry, which is ridiculous because he hasn’t cried in years, but then Bones is coming to curl around Jim, sleepy and soft and probably only half aware of what’s going on, and Jim feels his chest crack open like a dam bursting and all the relief he hasn’t let himself feel comes rushing forth).

\---

In the summer, things are easier. Jim wonders, sometimes, if it’ll always feel this way, if the strange half-life they inhabit in the summer months – Jim teaching a summer combat course and picking up odd jobs in and around campus, Bones splitting his time between research for his dissertation and teaching his own class, and Jim sometimes dragging the two of them to the shuttle bay like he’s made a habit of doing ever since he was sure that he wasn’t going to space without Bones at his side, slowly getting Bones used to the idea of flying – will always feel just a little bit quieter. Time passes in odd intervals, sometimes rushing by in a blur, sometimes stretching on for hours and hours as Jim and Bones find a warm spot to study and read, and Jim looks up one day and finds that half the summer has already passed. 

Jim goes out to dinner one day with Bones and Gaila and sort of invites them all over to Bones’ room afterwards for a drink and they end up staying up till the early hours of the morning talking. Jim wonders as Bones pours out drinks for all of them drinks when it stopped being weird again for him to think of Bones’ room as half his too, but as he settles down on Bones’ bed, nestling himself in a mound of blankets, he finds that he doesn’t care, that just knowing he’s welcome here again, unequivocally, is enough. 

Jim doesn’t know how, but somewhere around two in the morning, their conversation has gotten to this weird competition between Bones and Gaila, comparing tattoos and sob stories about exes, and Jim sits a little off to the side, pulling his knees up to his chest, feeling the full weight of all his bare skin maybe for the first time. He watches as they point to this tattoo and that, talking about exes who broke their hearts, who never gave back their stuff, who trash talked them to everyone they knew, talking about all of this like it’s a point of pride, having so many stories to tell, and Jim, who’s made a concerted effort to be alone his entire life and always thought he was smarter for it, can’t quite wrap his head around it. And what Jim learns by the end of it is that Bones has gotten his heart broken more times than Jim has given him credit for, more times than Jim has been able to pick up on by trying to find the tattoos on his body, and somehow, just like Gaila, Bones is still going at it despite it all. 

“Kiki Navarro,” Bones is saying now, touching a finger finally to the clean, simple circle on his right bicep (Jim’s seen, already, more tattoos than he thought Bones had, a tiny starburst on the outside of his thigh right by his knee, an abstract pattern of lines on his left hip, just under where the top of his pants fall, and Jim wonders what that must be like, to have always had a heart so tender and open). “My high school sweetheart. Said we’d do the long distance thing through college, and then she broke up with me a couple months into the first semester and pretty much immediately started dating someone she’d met in the first week of class.”

Gaila laughs, a sort of startled thing that somehow manages to be both amused and sympathetic at once. And this, Jim doesn’t get, the nonchalance with which Bones and Gaila treat their failed relationships, because he’s seen the heartbreak up close and personal, with his mother, with Bones, and he can’t imagine waking up one morning after that feeling whole enough to joke about it, to throw yourself back into the fray. But they go on, and Gaila points to a tattoo where her shoulder meets her neck, something that looks like several overlapping circles. 

“Maggie Kemper,” she says, something smirking and lilting in her voice like this is all a game instead of a wrong she’s suffered at the hands of someone she once loved. “When we broke up, she stole half my stuff and set it on fire.” She sighs then, a little like she’s wistful, a little like she’s just being dramatic. “I lost a lot of cute outfits to that girl.”

Bones laughs then, too, and makes a face at her like he’s trying to say _Oh yeah?_ , and they’ve been doing this for a couple rounds now, each time taking it up a notch, like they’re trying to one-up each other, like it’s a competition to see who’s gotten fucked over the most by their respective significant others. 

“Jocelyn Darnell,” Bones says, tugging up the hem of his shirt until the triangles on his ribcage show and the clean line through them. “We were together for more than five years, married for most of it, had a kid and everything. Then when things got tough, she left me and took everything with her.”

And this, Jim knows, is mostly tongue in cheek, because he knows that Bones mostly blames himself for the breakdown of their marriage and that anger and loss besides, Bones in truth bears her no ill will, even if that means he’ll never get the peace of his old life back, even if that means he’ll only get to see his daughter when she allows it, but it’s a game they’re playing, and Bones seems somehow determined to win. 

Gaila lets out another laugh then and finishes off her drink. She leans back where she’s perched against the wall, legs out and just nudging against Jim’s thigh, and smiles fondly at Bones, who’s leaning back on an arm next to Jim, the other hand cradling his drink.

“I’m impressed, doctor,” she says, and there’s a sort of quiet kindness in her expression like she only half-means it too. 

The corner of Bones’ mouth curves up into a sort of smirk and he finishes his drink too. He leans over the edge of the bed to set the empty glass down on the floor, and when he pulls himself back up onto the bed, Jim sees just the bottom sliver of the tattoo waiting to fully realize itself peeking out from under the sleeve of Bones’ t-shirt. Bones tugs on the sleeve without really looking like he means to, like it’s a habit, like there’s something about the tattoo that bothers him for some reason, and Jim doesn’t realize it till then, but he’s been waiting all night to hear about it. But Bones hasn’t brought it up and he hasn’t mentioned Marcos either, so Jim has no way of knowing if that’s the mark of Bones on his way to falling in love with someone he dated or if it’s something else altogether, and the air has a note of finality to it, like this part of the conversation is over, and Jim would never know how to steer any conversation back to this to learn what he wants to know. It bothers Jim more than it probably should, and even though Jim has learned more about Bones’ love life tonight than he has in the past almost two years of knowing him, it doesn’t feel like enough, and Jim comes away feeling disappointed despite it all. And that night, after Gaila’s left to go back to her place and Jim is curling up in Bones’ bed next to Bones just as the early summer sun is just starting to rise, all Jim can think about is the smudge of ink on Bones’ arm and what it could possibly mean.


	3. year 3

The easiness of summer passes into the rush of fall when the school year picks back up again, even more so now that Jim’s going through the final rounds of orientations and protocol briefings he’s required to do for a diplomatic mission aboard the _USS Farragut_ he was selected for late in the summer. He’d applied on a whim about half a year ago, thinking that time aboard a starship would be good experience, good training for the many months and years he’ll spend in space as a captain, and there’s a little part of him, the restless, reckless boy he thought he left in Riverside, that had gotten tired of the grind of studying and classes and exams and just wanted to get out there already, to chase that dream and get all the vastness that he was promised at his fingertips. And to be honest, even though Jim knows he’s somewhere at the top of his class, especially in his division, he hadn’t really expected to be chosen, because he’d asked around and there were third and fourth years applying for the handful of positions available for cadets, but by the time the fall term is starting for everyone else, Jim finds himself getting fitted for an official Starfleet issue uniform as an ensign-in-training, which doesn’t mean much, in the grand scheme of things, but when Jim looks down at his shiny new yellow shirt, he imagines having his three stripes on his sleeves someday and feels his chest swell with something warm and expansive. He thinks, maybe for the first time, he’s proud of something he’s done.

One week out, and it’s a little weird, Jim getting crash courses on interspecies policy and the history of the Federation’s relationship with the various planets they’ll be encountering on their mssion and the ins and outs of starship travel while he watches Bones go about life as usual, going to classes and doing his research and working shifts at Medical, like they’re two halves of his life that Jim can’t quite figure out how to fit together. In the evenings, when Bones is hunched over his desk as usual, going over the day’s paperwork from Medical and his most recent batch of data for his dissertation, Jim curls up on Bones’ bed with required readings he’s supposed to complete before he boards the Farragut, and sometimes, Jim can pretend like it’s just the start of another normal school year. But then later, when Bones tucks away his PADD and changes into his pajamas that he must’ve had since he was in college, they’re so worn and frayed, and complains to Jim about his dissertation or the recent bout of mono that’s been making its rounds through the first years, Jim finds that he doesn’t have much to offer, and where he would normally complain about his own classes or the annoying kids in the combat class he usually teaches who think they’re hot shit because they were jocks in high school, all Jim can offer is knowing nods and murmured sympathies. And Jim is excited to go, to have the stars at his fingertips like he was promised, to satisfy that flighty part of himself that’s always been plagued by the need to run, but there’s a part of the incongruousness of his looming mission against the backdrop of the normalcy of Bones’ daily routine at the Academy that sits heavy in Jim’s stomach, something almost like dread pooling up in the days leading up to the start of the mission.

A couple days out, and Bones watches idly from his bed as Jim runs around and gathers up the things he thinks he’ll need – changes of clothing and PADDs and various odds and ends that have been recommended by Starfleet. He dumps everything unceremoniously into a bag he’s borrowing from Bones, not having a duffle bag of his own (still, after all this time, and the moment Jim realized this, he’d marveled at how little he has and how little he minds that there’s no real home for him to return to, no real place for him to go other than forward). Bones is amused, Jim thinks as he bustles about the room, gathering up things that have migrated here from his own room, and Bones sits with his legs crossed on his bed with his back against the wall as he pretends to read an article on the effectiveness of exposure therapy on aviophobia (it’s a meta-analysis, he’d explained to Jim’s half-interested ears as he’d tucked in to read, and that makes it more reliable than Jim’s constant needling insistence, based on anecdotal evidence and sheer power of will alone). Mostly Bones peeks over his PADD at Jim and tries to stifle laughs as Jim frets about forgetting something important and he says something about how it’s like Jim has never packed for a trip before. 

“Oh, come on, Bones,” Jim whines as he recounts how many shirts he’s bringing, not that it’s going to be a problem since everything’s standard issue anyways and everything’ll get recycled over the course of the mission. But there’s something soothing about it anyways, like if he just remembers to bring the right things, everything will go just fine. “Give me some credit. I haven’t lived my whole life in Riverside.”

Flashes of a city, an entire colony, that no longer exists creep up on the edges of Jim’s vision and he stands suddenly and whirls about, looking for anything else to bring to distract himself. There’s one thing, he thinks, he hasn’t talked to Bones about yet, and keeps hearing the word _yet_ in his head even though he’s never talked about it to anyone, never planned on cracking open that can of worms again. He was always going to take that summer and the memory of Sam with him to the grave, and here he is thinking _yet_. He swallows back the bitterness creeping up the back of his throat and his eyes land on the stack of books about early space travel he keeps at the back of Bones’ desk for when he needs to feel something warm, and he lunges for them, needing something to steady him. He cradles them in his arms and runs his fingers along the edges of their worn pages and instantly feels a hair calmer. 

Next to him, Bones snorts. “You know those books are way past obsolete, right?” he says, either completely unaware of Jim’s momentary panic or else carefully avoiding talking about it like he knows Jim would be skittish about it. “Even when I was a kid, they were ancient.”

Jim clutches the books to his chest, perhaps a little childishly, but the anxiety continues to slowly dissipate, so he allows himself this much. “Grammy gave them to me,” he says, and if Bones has found it odd at all that Jim has taken to calling his grandmother _Grammy_ too like he too grew up making frequent visits to her sprawling ranch with its horse stables and fruit orchards, he’s never said anything about it, like he knows Jim has been starved for any kind of family since he was born. 

Bones laughs, a quiet, barely-there sort of thing and ducks his chin. “Yeah, well, they were mine first, so you know, you’re welcome,” he says, like he’s upset that Grammy gave away his possessions without asking, but his tone is light and joking and Jim figures he probably doesn’t mean it at all. 

Jim bends to tuck the books gingerly into his bag (Bones’ bag) and goes to flop on the bed (Bones’ bed) next to Bones, feeling a little weary. He thinks about how easy it was for him to drop everything and board that shuttle to San Francisco, all the belongings of his past life left behind him in a house that never felt like his even though he grew up there, even though his is the only name left on the property, his mother having long since abandoned a permanent Earth address and his step-father finally having been ditched and the rest of his family gone. He supposes his name is probably still on the property since he never thought to do anything about it and wonders idly if anyone even goes there now. He thinks about the motorcycle he spent a year restoring, thinks about how easy it was to leave behind in the shipyard, wonders if its new owner has been taking good care of it or if it’s been scrapped already. He thinks about how easy it was for him to leave Riverside and how much he’s quietly panicking now about a mission that will drop him off right back here where he can pick up his life where he left it, and he thinks about how much easier it was before. 

Bones nudges Jim with his foot like he can tell that Jim’s head is quickly turning into a storm of anxious thoughts. “Hey,” Bones says, gently, like he’s trying to coax Jim back down from whatever high ledge his mind has climbed up on. “It’s late. Let’s get some rest.”

Bones walks Jim through the overfamiliar routine of getting ready for bed and by the end of it all, by the time Jim is crawling between the cool sheets of Bones’ bed, pressed between him and the wall, the swarm of worries has eased into a dull buzz at the back of his head. Manageable. Something he can sleep off. 

Jim listens for Bones’ breathing to even out, the steady in-out soothing him as he wills his body to relax, hating that he got himself so keyed up. He lets the sound of Bones’ breathing lull him to sleep, and that night when he dreams, he dreams of ships careening off into the black void of space and faceless men descending upon him.

\---

The day Jim sets out, Bones goes with him to the shuttle bay to see him off, and Jim promises to write, even though Bones jokes about how he’ll probably beat his messages home, considering how low Jim is in the pecking order of this crew. Bones sends him off with a clap on the shoulder and _knock ’em dead, kid_ and watches with anxious, stiff shoulders as Jim boards the shuttle and is whisked away to the starship that’ll be his home for the next few months. Jim watches Bones fade into a tiny speck, Bones who is still uneasy about flying but less so than before, Bones who Jim thinks about puttering around in his room alone and wonders if by the time he gets back Bones will be used to the solitude again or if there will still be a Jim-sized space left in his life. As the shuttle comes to a stop in a soft bump against the _USS Farragut_ and Jim stands to file out along with the other cadets and officers who’ve been chosen for the mission, Jim tries not to think about it too much, because it leaves an unsettled feeling in his stomach.

Space travel, as it turns out, is a bit less exciting than Jim’s been imagining. It probably has to do, in part, with the fact that he’s not even a full ensign yet and he and the handful of other cadets are mostly here to run around and take care of chores no one else wants to do, and Jim mostly knew this, going into it, but it doesn’t stop him from getting bored as what was supposed to be a quick, routine check-in with a number of planets that have recently applied to be a part of the Federation drags on and on. Peace, as it turns out, is not an easy thing to come by. 

Jim spends most of his days making things for himself to do, because as much as he tells himself he’s grown and changed since coming to Starfleet, there’s still a part of him that’s itching for the next thing, that’s restless and wild and too much to be kept in one place for too long. He goes on runs through Engineering sometimes, because he gets antsy and the folks down in Engineering like him enough to let him go nuts every once in a while, and he writes messages to Bones about whatever he can think of when he has nothing else to do, little snippets of conversations he’d probably be having with Bones if he were planetside right now ( _So I’m rooming with three guys right now and at least two of them snore regularly so it’s twice as bad as living with Sora_ and _Regenerated coffee tastes funny. I don’t care how much they say it’s like the real thing, it’s really not_ and _Bones I’ve been on this ship for weeks and I have yet to actually set foot on an alien planet_ ). 

And sometimes, when sitting around waiting for something to happen gets to be too quiet, Jim finds an unoccupied observation deck close enough to Engineering that he can hear the gentle, steady humming of the warp core through the floor when he sits, and leans his head against the big window to look down at whichever planet they’re in orbit around. He sits sometimes and lets the hum soothe his frayed, restless nerves, and sometimes, he brings the books that Bones’ grandmother gave him, reads about the race to reach the stars as an act of war long before United Earth had formed, reads about the first ships to reach orbit, to reach the moon, and he thinks, _Now there’s something to be afraid of_ , reading about how shakily the first ships were put together by today’s standards, reads about the number of crashes and disasters in humanity’s first steps out into the great void of space. In the margins, Jim finds scribbled notes, some thoughtful adults’ musings on the nature of humanity’s optimism in slanting neat script and some enthusiastic children’s wishes to find that same magic in messy charming chicken scratch, and Jim looks them all over, reads them as carefully as he reads the text of the books themselves, wondering if Bones too wrote in these books as a kid like so many generations of McCoys before him. 

Jim ends up reading a lot in his downtime, between shifts in Engineering and shadowing various lieutenants and ensigns performing their duties so he can be better prepared when he joins their ranks, and he isn’t sure if it’s because he actually likes the books he’s reading that much (which he does enjoy, from the bottom of his heart, in a sort of childish, endlessly curious sort of way, like he still believes that all that can be out here is good news) or if it’s just because this one observation deck is the loudest place on board where he won’t have to deal with people striking up conversations with him when he wants to be alone. Because the thing they don’t tell you about space is how quiet it is. And this, Jim knows, because this is what you learn, that space is a void and sound can’t travel if there’s nothing there to help it along. But this is what they don’t tell you, that space may be a void but after a while it starts to feel like something solid, like something pushing in from all sides, and sometimes, Jim could swear that even the patter of his fellow crewmembers’ footsteps gets drowned out by it all. And this, Jim knows, is only the beginning of it. 

\---

About a month or so into the mission, Jim wakes to the startled yelp of one of his roommates and the solid _thunk_ of someone tumbling to the floor. Jim wakes, grumbling and bleary-eyed and peers over the edge of his bunk, a silent question passing between him and his roommates as they look around in the half-lit room – _What the hell?_ Jim doesn’t go on shift for another handful of hours – and it’s a strange thing trying to sleep in this cavernous expanse and he doesn’t sleep well most nights and blames it on his bed, this narrow, firm thing that’s nothing like the bed he’s gotten used to sleeping on at the Academy, and it’s cold besides – and he finds himself thinking that this better be worth it. His roommate who fell, a fourth year command track named Anders, is staring wide-eyed at his side, his fingers prodding gently, almost reverently at what must be a new spot of ink, just above where his ribcage ends, and as Jim peers closer with his other two roommates, the grumbles at being awoken fade into a soft silence. 

“You got someone back home?” one of Jim’s roommates, Sebastian, ventures finally after the quiet settles around them like a blanket. 

Anders blinks down at his side like he can’t believe it. “Yeah,” he says, stunned. “We’ve only been together a month though. I didn’t—I mean I wasn’t sure. I was going to think about it and I was going to tell her when I got back if I was sure about how I felt.”

Soft _oohs_ and _ahhs_ fill the room and all Jim can feel is a hollowness in his chest. He supposes he’s supposed to feel awed, amazed, overjoyed that that this guy he’d probably consider a friend has found something that everyone falls over themselves for, but the guys Jim’s rooming with, he’s seen all of them, knows that they all wear the proud tattoos of the well-loved, the never-afraid, and Jim thinks how can he, with all his many miles of bare skin, even begin to imagine what this must be like? 

When everyone gets up and starts getting ready for the day, a few hours later, all good cheer and chattering about significant others, past and present, and Jim shoots off another message to Bones – _A guy I’m rooming with discovered his girlfriend’s tattoo on him today. Crazy isn’t it – he’s lightyears from home and he’s falling in love._ He doesn’t realize he’s trying to ask a question until after he presses _send_. Jim lays in bed for a while as his roommates take turns showering and get dressed and can’t quite put his finger on why it felt so important. 

Later, Jim receives a message from Bones, probably in response to something banal he sent weeks ago. It reads, _Hang in there, kid. Your turn will come._ That’s it, short and simple. Jim has no idea what Bones’ message is even in reference to – he can probably guess, though, complaints about work, complaints about not feeling useful – but something about receiving this message on this particular day jars Jim, shaking him right down to his core. Jim imagines Bones saying it to him if they were talking in person, probably sliding a stiff drink to him to settle Jim’s ever-ticking nerves, that simple, gentle kindness Bones wears so well. Jim thinks about this imaginary conversation and wonders what Bones is doing now – is he in class? Is he working? Is he grabbing a drink with Gaila as he’s gotten more likely to do, the two taking to each other easily over the common ground of broken hearts and unflagging belief in the goodness of people, still? What time is it on Earth anyways? Jim has lost track of the days, his time ruled by artificial schedules, clocking in when one shift begins and clocking out when it ends. Jim wonders if Bones sleeps alone now in that big bed he keeps complaining about never getting to take full advantage of, thank you very much Jim. Jim’s chest aches and he can’t figure out why (there’s a lot these days, he thinks, that he can’t quite figure out, clever as he prides himself on being). He can’t get Bones’ message out of his head all day. 

\---

Bones is right, in the end. In time, Jim does get to go down with the landing party and he does get to observe as the higher ups, the Actually Important People, discuss various sticking points in this planet’s quest to join the Federation with the local political leaders. Jim doesn’t get to say much, mostly watches and listens and learns, dutifully taking notes on the day’s proceedings like he’s supposed to. Which is fine, mostly, because it’s pretty much what he signed up for, even if it gets quite dull at times, months of listening and learning so he can be better for it, professional development, everyone keeps saying. So he watches and takes notes and keeps sending messages home to Bones ( _Anders won’t shut up about his girlfriend now that he knows he’s in love with her. I think even Sebastian and Galen are getting tired of it_ and _I took notes for ten hours today while Captain Garrovick argued with the natives over what’s fair and what’s not_ and _Man, what I wouldn’t do for a real, honest to god, non-regenerated drink right now – save me some of that good bourbon for when I get back, okay?_ ) even though he knows at this point that he really might beat his messages home. 

After Jim starts going down to the planet with the rest of the landing party, he almost takes back his former restlessness, because it’s boring, endless work even if it is necessary, but he doesn’t, because it’s worth it just to feel real gravity beneath his feet and see a new world with his own eyes (and it’s like this sometimes, Jim getting antsy under the pressures of space travel and then getting all that dazzling wonder thrown in his face and thinking, _This is why we do it, this is why we are explorers_ ). Still, the whole process takes weeks of the same conversations over and over and over again at each planet they visit, all of the higher ups running through the same protocols at every stop, and Jim sometimes wishes there was more of the wonder and less of the procedure. If Bones were here, Jim thinks, he’d probably roll his eyes and say something about the youth these days and _Why does have any patience anymore_ and Jim would have to remind Bones that as old as Bones thinks he is, he’s really not that much older than Jim, certainly not old enough to warrant acting like a crotchety old man all the time. 

But Jim does get impatient, because as much as he knows it’s important work they’re doing, doing pretty much the same thing day in and day out will get to anyone. And anyways, all of the officials had seemed sure that it wouldn’t be a terribly long mission. They promised, the higher ups, when they set out that they’d all be back before the holidays – before Christmas, before New Year’s, before Jim’s birthday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the destruction of the _USS Kelvin_ , the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day Jim escaped the death his father suffered. It would be nice, Jim supposes, to be home in time for the holidays if he were anyone else, if he took comfort in the emphasis on cheer and love and family like everyone else. But in the times between his impatience, when he’s off duty or writing letters home to Bones or eating lunch with some of his crewmembers, Jim finds himself checking the date sometimes, a little part of him hoping as the mission drags on that they don’t make it back on time. He’d like to have just one birthday, he thinks, that he doesn’t have to worry about. Maybe on the ship, with more important things to worry about, everyone will finally leave him alone like it’s just any other day at the office. 

(He wonders, though, guiltily, what the holidays would be like for Bones if he didn’t make it home, Bones who still may not be welcome in Georgia, Bones who might have to spend the holidays alone, Bones who’s always found a way to make the brittleness in Jim’s chest feel a little less like coming unhinged, Bones who Jim might not be able to come through for the same way this year.)

(Jim wonders, and almost wants to make it back to Earth on time.)

\---

As it turns out, Jim is only half as lucky as he hopes he’ll be. The mission stretches on impossibly through Christmas, the holiday punctuated by glowing festive lights along the many corridors and peppermint flavored everything for dessert in the mess hall, and spirits are festive, that day, some of the more senior crewmembers, who’ve been working together for years, exchanging friendly gifts. And then it’s like they’re racing the clock home, trying to make it back before the new year, at least, if they couldn’t make it back for Christmas, and everyone is working around the clock to make sure they get home. Jim finds himself pulling long shifts, making notes during the talks he attends and helps out in Engineering and with security as necessary, and in between, he gets restless, fitful bouts of sleep that leave him feeling drained and unfocused. 

Jim works harder than he thinks he can remember ever working, and he uses that as his excuse for why he doesn’t notice that’s he’s running on empty a little more than usual and not that he still takes the long way back to his bunk from the transporter room to avoid walking past Medbay, that he’s been doing this since he walked past Medbay the first time and felt his entire body seize up at just the sight of it through closing doors. So Jim just bows his head and works until the announcement comes that following that the civil unrest they encountered on the planet below them has been successfully resolved and they’ll all be heading home before the new year, and then he finishes up his last shift in Engineering and crawls into his bunk and sleeps, feeling like he hasn’t slept in days. 

Jim jerks awake sometime later to Captain Garrovick announcing over the shipwide channel that they’ve successfully docked at Earth and thanking the entire crew for their service, thanking them for their time and effort and sacrifice, but Jim barely hears the announcement. He feels like his entire head has been filled with cotton and his mouth feels dry, the back of his throat hurting with each swallow like he hasn’t had any water in days. He sits up groggily in his bunk and blunders his way through gathering up his things with his roommates, mindlessly following the stream of people disembarking. On his shuttle trip up to the ship, many months earlier, he’d gazed out the window at the planet, the blue and green and white swirls of it, and the sun and the many stars beyond and he’d wondered how Bones could’ve flown in a shuttle before and not marveled at it all, wondered how he could get Bones to feel that same rush that Jim does, but now, Jim just closes his eyes and leans his head against the cool window and wonders why the shuttle’s so hot. 

When Jim gets in range of Earth, a whole slew of missed comms come flooding through to him, things Starfleet didn’t deem important enough to forward to him on the ship, and most of them are from friends wishing him good luck on the mission and telling him to come home soon, invites from friends to Christmas parties he missed, and at the top of his inbox is a stack of comms from Bones, sparser than the rest like Bones knew he probably couldn’t reach Jim and was saving messages for special occasions. They’re mostly everyday things ( _My dissertation committee’s really been on my ass this week_ and _Some dumb kids thought it’d be a good idea to set off sparklers and shit in all the dorms and set off all the fire alarms in the building_ and _Gaila and her girlfriend had a fight today and I’ve spent all day comforting her about it_ ) but the most recent one reads _Sorry, I knew I said I’d pick you up, but I can’t make it to the shuttle bay today – there’s an emergency in Medical_. And Jim feels like he probably should feel more disappointed that his best friend won’t be coming to see him when he touches down, but mostly, he just feels tired and numb as he hauls his things off of the shuttle.

The familiar San Francisco chill rushes up to meet him but does nothing to wake him from the heavy stupor he finds himself in him as he shuffles his way to campus. By the time he makes it back to campus and drags himself back to the dorms, he feels like he could fall asleep standing up, so he doesn’t even think about Bones’ message, just takes the lift up to Bones’ room and shucks off his jacket and kicks off his shoes in a pile on the floor and dives into Bones’ empty bed still dressed, letting his body melt into the soft mattress. Bones’ bed smells clean and warm and like it’s actually been slept in, not like the sterile bunk he’d been assigned on the _Farragut_ , and Jim doesn’t even care that he should probably wait up for Bones, because he’s so tired and this bed feels so much like a real place where his bunk on the ship didn’t and he falls asleep without truly meaning to. 

Jim jerks awake again an indeterminate stretch of time later, this time to the sound of the door sliding open and Bones stumbling into the room, sounding like he’s juggling too many things, and Jim realizes he fell asleep with the lights on. Bones is offering an explanation for why he couldn’t make it to the shuttle bay to pick Jim up and saying something about getting coffee and Jim’s favorite lo mein from that hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant they discovered during their first year at three in the morning after a late night out, and Jim can just see him through his sleep-hazed eyes in the half-lit room. It takes Jim a moment to realize that Bones has fallen silent, and when Jim drags his gaze up to look around, he finds Bones frowning at him, boxes of takeout in one hand and two cups of coffee stacked one on top of the other in the other hand. 

“What the hell happened to you?” Bones says, like he’s trying to sound snappy, but there’s something almost warm in his tone anyways, like he’s glad Jim is back, like he’s glad he has someone to snap at. 

Jim squeezes his eyes shut and tugs the blanket up over his ears. “I don’t feel good,” he mumbles from under the blankets. 

Jim hears Bones sigh and his soft footsteps pad over to where Jim is, and after a handful of seconds, Jim feels the blankets easing down again. When he opens his eyes, he finds Bones frowning down at him with that pinch in his eyebrow that he gets when he’s thinking, and Bones touches a cool hand to Jim’s forehead, swearing under his breath. 

“Jim, you’re burning up,” Bones says, but he sounds concerned instead of angry so Jim considers it a win. “What did they do to you on that ship?”

Jim offers a half-assed shrug. “There was work to do,” he says. 

Bones presses his mouth into a thin line and lets out a breath. Behind him, Jim can see the takeout boxes and coffee stacked neatly on Bones’ desk, and Jim wonders absently how long Bones spent running all over the city for that, because Chinatown isn’t close by any means, but the thought stops short of coming to anything and Jim finds that thinking feels like wading through molasses. Bones runs a hand through his hair and goes to get his medkit, grumbling something under his breath about Starfleet working its cadets to death and he’s going to have to talk to someone about this because it’s fucking ridiculous, cadets coming back from a training mission dead sick, and then Bones is sitting down on the bed next to Jim and looking him over with his tricorder and the bed dips towards Bones, making Jim slide slowly over to him. 

“Why didn’t you go to Medical, kid?” Bones asks softly, like he’d trying very hard not to get too worked up. “Lots of good doctors on that ship who could’ve gotten you patched up before you even made it home.”

_Home_ , Jim thinks and is surprised to find that the word actually means something real to him now, and he says, “You _know_ why I couldn’t.”

Which is probably unfair, because this is something Jim’s never talked to Bones about, and even if Bones seems to know intuitively that Jim can’t or won’t go see a doctor and even if Jim hacked Starfleet’s records to make Bones his primary physician not months after they met, giving Bones full access to Jim’s entire medical history, dating all the way back to his birth, including the year Jim likes to pretend never existed – even if all of that is true, it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve never actually talked about it like real human beings, and it’s unfair. But Jim’s sick and he feels pathetic and he probably looks pathetic, so he just pulls the blankets up again and hopes that it’ll all be over soon. 

“Am I going to be okay?” Jim asks, hating how small he sounds, like he’s still a scared little kid. 

Bones smiles down at Jim, something soft and reassuring and more than likely practiced, Jim thinks, because there’s no one more practiced in the care and comfort of others than Bones. “Yeah,” Bones says. “Just the flu. You just need some rest. I’m going to give you something for the fever, okay?”

Jim nods yes, and as Bones presses a hypo as gently as he knows how into Jim’s neck, Jim thinks about all the times that Bones has patched him up, thinks about all the times that Bones has asked and asked and asked, _Is this okay?_ Like he knows that Jim gets jumpy around even the suggestion of doctors or medication. Like he knows that Jim hates nothing more than not knowing what’s going into his body. Bones fusses about Jim some more, like he’s afraid that the time spent in space has done something irreparable to Jim, and makes Jim drink most of a glass of water before he lets Jim sleep. Bones dims the lights and settles down at his desk, propping his feet up as he fiddles around on his PADD and sips at the coffee he got for both of them, and Jim wonders what he did to deserve someone like Bones, because no one has ever taken care of him like this. 

“Hey Bones?” Jim says a moment later, feeling warm and sleepy and safe. 

“Hmm?” Bones hums, looking up from his PADD, the glow of it illuminating his face, making all the hard planes of it look smooth and soft.

“Thank you,” Jim says, his eyelids already feeling heavy. 

Jim just catches the smile that eases its way onto Bones’ and wonders for a brief moment if Bones always smiled that easily or if it’s Jim’s homesick heart exaggerating the warmth in Bones’ eyes. 

“Of course,” Bones says, and Jim probably thinks it sounds a little too much like _Welcome home_.

\---

Jim wakes to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and the sound of Bones humming softly to himself as he putters about the room, and when Jim opens his eyes, he sees Bones scooping up dirty laundry and gathering up odds and ends that have accumulated around his room, the remains of long afternoons studying and late nights laughing over drinks (with who, Jim wonders, with Gaila? With someone new? Someone he doesn’t know?) or reading or watching a movie. His head pounds as he pushes himself up in the bed and his entire body aches, but somehow, as he looks around at the familiar nooks and crannies of Bones’ room – the place he always kicks off his shoes when he comes back from a long day out, the place his academy reds peek out from the closet, the place on Bones’ desk where a little Christmas tree sits like it always does in the weeks leading up to the holidays and after and he wonders if Bones went out and got the tree for himself this year because Jim wasn’t there to do it – somehow, he finds that he feels more settled than he’s felt in the past handful of months. _Home_ , Jim thinks, and smiles. 

Jim groans as he sits, pushing the heel of his hand into his forehead as if it’ll help him feel a little less like his head is about to explode, and he notices that he’s undressed, his stiff travel clothes stripped off of him, and he wonders when that happened or why he didn’t notice (he’s probably doing less well than he’d let himself believe, he thinks). His moving and groaning must catch Bones’ attention, because Bones is on him in a minute, pressing a firm hand to Jim’s forehead like he’s some old-timey doctor and then pressing a full glass of water into Jim’s hand, cradling a cup of fresh coffee in the other hand and refusing to hand it to Jim until Jim finishes his water. And then Bones is pressing another hypo into Jim’s neck ( _I have to give you another dose, okay? Or your brain’s going to melt out of your ears_ ) and he gives Jim another thorough once over with his tricorder just to be extra sure, and then and only then does Bones sit back down in his desk chair, arms crossed and mouth turned down, studying Jim like he’s afraid Jim might vanish at any moment. Jim would say something about it, something snarky and sarcastic, something like _You missed me or something_ , but Jim can barely think through the thick fog in his head, so he just drinks his coffee and waits. He doesn’t bother to wonder how he knows to just wait. 

“You really should go to Medical next time,” Bones says finally, leaning over to touch the back of his hand to Jim’s cheek to make sure his fever’s going down. Jim shivers involuntarily, which makes Bones frown more. 

“What’s the point of being friends with a doctor if I still have to go to the hospital?” Jim says, realizing only after the words have left his mouth that he’s only half-joking. 

The corner of Bones’ mouth turns up at that, but the worried crease doesn’t leave his brow, and Jim feels something clench in his stomach. 

“Jim,” Bones sighs, like he’s been holding onto this all night, like he’s been waiting for Jim to feel just a little bit better to let his own hurts unfurl. “This time you were lucky, and it was just the flu. But I was serious when I said that there’s all kinds of shit out there back when we first met. Next time, it might be something different, something worse; there’s diseases out there that can kill you in a matter of hours, not to mention toxins and poisons and parasites. Next time, you might not have time to warp back to Earth so I can treat you.”

Jim tightens his grip on his mug and tugs the blankets up around his shoulders. “Bones,” he starts, dread sitting heavy in his throat, because he doesn’t want to have to explain himself, because he’s not equipped to handle it sick and tired as he is, but he doesn’t know how to get his point across without dredging up all the ugly things he keeps locked away in his chest. 

Bones runs a hand through his hair. “Look Jim,” he says, “I get trauma, okay? I get phobias; you know I do. But this is your life we’re talking about.” He pauses then and presses his lips together like he can’t quite find the words to say what needs to be said. “Please, Jim.”

And Bones sounds so brittle when he says Jim’s name that Jim doesn’t know what to do but nod, if only to get Bones to look more warm and gentle and like himself again. Bones lets out a breath and pulls himself to his feet, murmurs something about going out to get Jim something to eat, calling behind him for Jim to drink some more water. Jim nods again even though Bones can’t see him and he wonders why he feels like he’s let Bones down somehow. 

\---

When Bones returns, Jim can still see the tense set to his shoulders and he fears for a wild moment that Bones is going to badger him again, that Bones is going to poke and pry because he knows better than anyone how to peel away Jim’s layers, but Bones just offers Jim soup from a new deli that popped up while Jim was away and fusses over Jim to stay in bed and rest even though Jim’s starting to get antsy now that the initial exhaustion has worn off and the meds have kicked in. Bones makes Jim finish his soup and then makes Jim drink more water and then makes Jim take a nap, threatening to hypo him to sleep if he doesn’t listen. By the time Jim wakes up again, he finds that it’s late in the day and he feels groggy still but a million miles better and Bones is wearing a different outfit and he looks freshly showered, like he just got back from a run or a workout. Bones is just tugging a sweater over his head and Jim thinks he recognizes it, the cable knit pattern, the creamy white color, but he’s never seen Bones wear it before. 

Bones turns and looks at Jim like he’s spotting him for the first time, pausing in the middle of tugging his sweater down, and there’s a moment where Bones’ face is almost broken open and there’s something in Bones’ eyes that Jim doesn’t quite get, like Bones almost wasn’t expecting to see Jim there, like Bones in Jim’s absence has gotten used to not having to make a space for him anymore. But then it passes, and Bones’ expression smooths over into a small smile, and Jim can’t decide if he really saw the odd, stunned expression on Bones’ face or if it’s just his eyes playing tricks on him, and he doesn’t have time to think about it either, because then Bones is walking over to him and dropping down into his desk chair, flicking on the lights decorating his Christmas tree. He leans over and touches the back of his hand to Jim’s cheek like he’s afraid if he doesn’t check that everything will go to shit, and when he sits back in his seat again, he reaches under his desk and pulls out a wrapped gift. 

“Grammy sent this back with me,” Bones says, handing the package to Jim, the corners of his mouth turning up again. Jim thinks he would give anything to see Bones smile for real, just for a second, mouth pulled wide, eyes crinkling just so around the edges. 

Jim takes the present from Bones, unable to stop the way his own mouth pulls up at the sight of it, the carefully pressed creases and edges in the wrapping paper, the little places it’s crinkled or torn just a little from being transported all the way back from Georgia. Jim looks up, feeling something like wonder high in his chest. 

“You went home?” he asks.

Bones shrugs and crosses his arms, looking away. “Apparently Grammy said that the house was as much hers as Grandpa’s,” he says, sounding like he’s bursting with relief and gratitude but trying to hide it. He looks back at Jim and smiles, “So yeah.”

Jim’s fingers hover above a seam in the wrapping paper, waiting but unsure of what he’s waiting for. “How was it?” he asks, and his voice comes out small and careful, like he’s walking on eggshells instead of talking to his best friend. 

Bones smiles, softly, just a little, though his eyes are still sad. “It was nicer than I expected,” he says and then looks down and pauses. He looks up again a moment later and he says, “I got to see Joanna.”

Jim’s eyes widen and he feels something weighty and significant settle between them and make a home for itself. “Yeah?” Jim says, because he can’t find a better way to articulate this thing that he’s feeling, this joy by proxy, this excitement at a little girl he’s never met, who he has no attachment to. He wonders if he’ll meet her someday. He wonders why that feels like something he might want to do. 

Bones’ smile softens into something almost wistful but warmer. “Yeah, Jocelyn’s been good about it, at least,” he says and he sounds like he means it. He rubs at the place on his side where Jim knows Jocelyn’s tattoo is, where Jim still feels the weight of it in his own chest like it’s his weight to carry too. “It’s been more than two years. She’s gotten so big now. She started school. She showed me pictures of all the friends she’s made.” Bones pauses and his smile starts to fade and he says, his voice just breaking around the edges, “Sometimes, I worry that I’ll look up and Starfleet will have taken up more years of my life and she won’t even remember me.”

Jim feels his breath leave his body and he remembers being young and always staying at Grandpa Tiberius’ and he remembers staring up into the night sky with Sam, trying to guess where his mother was. _Maybe she’s by Ursa Major tonight_ , pointing to a cluster of stars in the sky, _maybe she’s by Cygnus_. 

“She probably thinks her dad’s a superhero,” Jim offers, tentative, unsure if it’s his place to even say. “That you’re out chasing the stars.”

Bones laughs, but his eyes are still a little sad. “Is that what you thought?” he asks, searching Jim’s face as if for the answer to everything. “About your mom?”

Then it’s Jim’s turn to laugh, a sort of startled thing because it’s like Bones can read his mind. “Yeah, when I was, like, a kid,” he says, trying to play it off like some cute, amusing story, trying not to let it show how much those hazy, warm memories hurt to recall. 

Bones looks at Jim, contemplative. “When did it stop?” he asks.

Jim takes a breath and looks away, shrugging. “I don’t know,” he says, feeling all the old instincts to evade and run on the tip of his tongue. “I guess I just grew up. I realized that she wasn’t that person anymore. My dad’s death changed everything and she didn’t love the same way anymore. Not that she didn’t love me. Not that she wasn’t still, amazingly, charging on into space despite everything. She was just different than the person everyone else got to know. Sometimes I feel like I’m still waiting to meet her.” 

There’s a beat where Jim falls silent, realizing suddenly that this is the first time he’s articulated the feeling he gets around his mother, realizing that this is the first time he’s really admitted that being around her isn’t just hard, that it isn’t just that she’s at times distant, that it’s that talking to her is like talking to a stranger. His mother, an almost mythical character in his childhood imagination. His mother, a superhero he grew up thinking could do anything in the entire universe. His mother, a stranger. Bones looks at Jim like he’s something to be protected, looks at Jim like _he’s_ afraid of becoming his daughter’s ghost too. 

“You’re a good dad, Bones,” Jim says, Jim who knows that Bones makes every effort to reach out to his daughter, to write her letters, to call her on the days her mother allows, Jim who knows that Bones thinks about her every day. “She loves you. You talk to her as much as you can. She’s not going to forget you.”

Bones duck his chin and rubs his forehead, like he’s embarrassed for even thinking it. “Yeah,” he says, and he sounds like what Jim said is everything he’s never let himself hope for. There’s a moment and then Bones clears his throat and straightens up like he’s rearranging the pieces of his life, and then he smiles, nods towards the box that Jim’s still cradling in his lap, and says, “Better open that so you can write Grammy a thank you note. She’s been getting impatient.”

Laughter swells in Jim’s chest and it’s like all the tension from the past handful of moments melts away. He tears away at the brightly colored paper and pries open the box, and it’s all but overflowing with things and Jim feels something tighten in his chest. He pulls out first a soft, creamy white sweater with the same cable knit pattern as the one Bones is wearing, hand-knit and carefully made. Jim wonders how long it took to make it.

Jim looks up at Bones in surprise. “We match,” he says.

Bones laughs and scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, Grammy’s funny like that,” he says, sounding a little like he’s dodging something Jim can’t quite put his finger on. “At least they’re not embarrassing to wear in public as long as we don’t wear them on the same day.”

Jim laughs and tugs the sweater over his head, running his fingers over the bumps and ridges in the pattern. It’s warm and soft and the sleeves come up just past his thumbs when he pulls the sleeves down like Grammy’s used to making sweaters for someone slightly bigger than him. He pushes the sleeves up to his elbows as he continues to dig through the box. He finds the same little things as last year – credits and candies – and at the bottom of the box, Jim finds a container and when he pries it open, he finds that it’s filled with muffins, blueberry and cherry and cranberry and probably a few days old but clearly homemade, and Jim wonders if the fruits in the muffins are from home too, remembering stories Bones told him about all of the cousins going to the ranch to pick peaches and plums and all sorts of berries when they came in season every year. 

“You should try the muffins before they sit any longer,” Bones says, sounding maybe a little homesick. “I don’t know what she does to them, but you won’t find better muffins anywhere else.”

Jim laughs and breaks off a piece of one of them. “Secret recipe?” he asks. 

Bones chuckles then too. “Something like that,” he says.

Jim’s about to say that they can’t be that good, can they, because they’re just muffins and what can you do to a muffin to make it as magical as Bones is making them seem. But then he pops the piece into his mouth and his thoughts stop dead in their tracks. 

“Oh my god,” Jim breathes out, unable to stop himself, because it’s probably the best pastry he’s ever had. It’s just dense enough, just sweet enough, with just enough fruit, and Jim thinks, inexplicably, that it tastes like home. He can’t remember the last time he had a proper homemade thing like this. He can’t remember the last time someone was there to make him something like this. 

Bones laughs and leans over to grab a muffin for himself, and Jim swats his hand away, but he’s joking, mostly. Bones leans back in his seat again and watches as Jim digs around his gift box, making sure he didn’t miss anything important and Jim wonders if Bones opened his presents alone on Christmas or if the cousins still went to Grammy’s house during the holidays to open presents together, because Jim hasn’t had real Christmases since he was a kid, but even he knows that something like this just isn’t the same without others around. 

At the bottom of the box is another handwritten note, just like last year, written out in the same elegant, precise cursive, and Jim’s heart leaps into his throat as he reads it. 

_Jim_ , it reads this time, _By the time you read this I know it will be long past Christmas, but what are the holidays but an excuse for loved ones to remind you they care? Leo tells me that you’ve found your way to the stars, and he’d never say it, but he’s very proud of you. Scared, but proud. It’s the curse of caring for someone, I suppose. We had a lovely time catching up this year at the ranch. I do hope that you know that next time the holidays roll around, if you like, you’re quite welcome to join us. Leo tells me you’re quite the singer, given the right encouragement. I’d love to hear you sing someday. Merry Christmas —Grammy M_

Jim stares at the note in wonder, unable to wrap his head around how someone he’s never met is able to hit on all the things that tug on what Jim keeps hidden inside of him every time she writes to him, like she can crack open the locked box he calls his chest with just the right words. Jim looks up at Bones, who’s looking at him knowingly, like he knows too that this is the effect that she has on people, maybe has always had on people, and Jim stares in wonder at Bones, thinking about what kind of grandchild a woman like that raises. 

In the distance, a few rogue fireworks go off, and Bones checks the clock he keeps on his desk. He looks back at Jim and the corner of his mouth turns up. 

“Happy new year,” he says. 

Jim laughs without knowing why, and he feels warm all over, the kind of warmth that starts somewhere deep in his chest, somewhere he’d forgotten existed before he got to Starfleet, and spreads all the way to his fingers and toes until they tingle. And he thinks, perhaps for the first time, that maybe this’ll be a pretty good year. 

\---

Jim ends up feeling better in a couple days, just like Bones kept assuring him in the worst of his illness when Jim moaned and groaned about being on the verge of death, but Bones lets Jim lay around in bed in the days after that, like Bones knows that the days are dragging slowly towards Jim’s least favorite day of the year. Jim thinks that Bones probably figures that the school year hasn’t started yet and Bones is in and out anyways, picking up the new shifts he’s been assigned in Medical, and Bones probably thinks that a little rest probably couldn’t hurt Jim after the mission ran him ragged. So Jim mostly lies around in bed all day, burrowed down in a cocoon of Bones’ blankets like he can avoid the reality of the world forever if he just stays in this bubble, and he emerges only when Bones comes back, often with food, something different each day, something Jim’s missed in his months away. Bones just lets Jim just sit and eat and listen as Bones catches Jim up on everything he’s missed (Jim almost chokes on his coffee when Bones tells Jim that he organized the Academy’s first conference on astrophobia, and Bones just shrugs and says something about how it turns out there are more of them than anyone thought and Jim feels something swell in his chest as Bones talks to Jim about a talk he attended about the effect of trauma on the development of astrophobia), and Jim almost lets himself believe that maybe this year, he’ll coast under the radar. Maybe this year, his birthday will come and go and he won’t have to go anywhere to hide but here. 

But then, the night before his birthday, when Jim is curled in bed watching a movie and Bones is at his desk going through the paperwork that he’s put off since winter break began, there’s a knock on the door. And it’s like a scene in a movie and Jim and Bones both look up from what they’re doing and look at the door and then at each other and then back at the door like neither of them have ever heard someone knock on a door before. Bones frowns at Jim and slowly sets his PADD down, lowering his feet from where they’ve been propped up on his desk.

“Are you expecting someone?” Bones asks, and when Jim shakes his head no, the crease in Bones’ brow furrows as he slowly stands to go to the door. 

Bones turns the lights up just a touch so they’re not just sitting in the strange half-light they left Bones’ room in when the sun set, and Jim reaches over to the foot of the bed for the sweater that Bones’ grandmother knitted him, pulling it over his head and running his fingers through his hair so he looks at least somewhat decent should whoever’s outside come in. Jim can feel his pulse pounding beneath his skin and can’t figure out why he feels like he wants to crawl out of his own skin. 

The door slides open and Bones says, “Oh. Hello. Can I help you?”

His voice sounds almost stunned, like he doesn’t know what to make of whoever is at the door. Jim leans across the bed to try to get a better look at who’s in the doorway, but Bones’ shoulders are broad and the angle that the bed’s at relative to the door’s wrong anyways, and it’s not until the person who’s there speaks that Jim gets any idea of who they are.

“I’m looking for my son,” a woman’s voice says, smooth and calm like still water. “I was told I could find him here.”

And in that instant, Jim’s entire body seizes up in recognition of the voice he’d recognize anywhere and he’s suddenly very cold. Even in a crowded room, he thinks, that voice would cut straight through to him like a knife through water. Bones turns slowly and looks over his shoulder at Jim, stepping aside just so, and then Jim sees her, blonde and statuesque, the woman who gave him the slope of his nose and the slant of his jaw, the woman who he looks so much like, at the end of the day even though everyone says _You look so much like your father_ over and over like after enough times, it’ll somehow bring him back. Jim looks at her sometimes and thinks that of course she’s his mother, they’re so alike. But he looks at her other times and he think maybe he’s never known anyone else to love so much and yet be so distant. 

“Jim?” Bones asks softly, like he’s asking for permission, though for what, Jim doesn’t know.

Jim blinks, first at Bones and then at his mother. “Bones,” Jim says, stunned and slack-jawed, without really looking at Bones, “This is my mom, Winona.”

Which is probably obvious, because everyone has always said that he looked like his mother and Bones doesn’t look at all surprised, just nods and steps aside to let her in, saying something like _Come in_ or _Nice to meet you_ or some other nicety that Jim doesn’t have the wherewithal to hear, because he still can’t wrap his head around the fact that his mother is here, visiting him. He can’t remember the last time she dropped in on him unannounced like this. He wonders if there even is a last time to remember. 

Jim stares at her as she approaches him and thinks about the last time he saw her, almost a year ago to the day, chasing her down for coffee the day after his birthday. There are times, Jim thinks, that he doesn’t know why he’s still chasing a version of her that probably doesn’t exist anymore instead of trying to get to know the person she is now. But then she nods towards the foot of the bed like she’s asking if she can sit, and Jim’s thrown back into the warm years of his youth, five years old and his mother sitting at the foot of his bed like she is now, her on one of her good days, smiling and giving and warm, too, and Jim thinks, how could he not want some of that back in his life. 

“What are you doing here?” Jim asks, the words hitting the roof of his mouth and tasting more bitter than he means. 

Winona lets out a breath, soft and short. “A mother can’t come visit her son?” she asks. 

Jim just blinks at her, stunned into silence, wanting to say something mean and petty, something like _Mothers do, but you don’t_ , and he wonders if this is who they’re always doomed to be to each other, each clinging onto a version of reality that doesn’t exist. 

Beside them, Bones clears his throat, and when Jim looks up at him, Bones is shifting his weight from his heels to his toes and back, uncharacteristically fidgety, and Jim feels his throat tighten. 

“Why don’t I go get us some coffee?” Bones offers, sounding like he’s doing his best not to seem like he feels awkward and out of place and only half-succeeding. “Give you two some time to catch up.”

Bones looks at Jim in this last bit, raising an eyebrow just a touch like he’s asking Jim if that’s okay, and Jim nods, thinking he’s never met someone so careful and thoughtful about permissions and acknowledgments. Bones flashes a smile at Jim and Winona that looks too bright and makes a hasty retreat out of the room, leaving Jim alone with his mother in a room that suddenly feels too quiet and stuffy. 

There’s a moment, and then Winona straightens up, crossing one leg over the other. “He seems nice,” she says, smiling vaguely at him. 

Jim slouches back against the pillows piled on his end of the bed, almost wishing, childishly, that they’d swallow him up. “Yeah,” he says. 

Winona takes an even breath and then says, “I hear you’re doing quite well here. If what I hear is true, Captain Garrovick may want you to officially serve on his ship following your graduation.”

Jim twists his mouth to the side, crossing his arms. Because this is what he hates about talking to his mother, this dance that they do, this polite but somewhat removed small talk, the way that for whatever reason they go through this every time they see each other for several minutes before either of them get even close to anything real. And on a normal day, Jim would probably grin and bear it, because this is how they’ve always been and one of them will get to the point eventually, anyways, and he’d rather not fight with his mother, but today, Jim is tired and barely recovered from the flu and his birthday is looming just over the horizon, and today, it’s just too much to deal with. 

“Mom, what do you want?” Jim breathes out on a deep sigh, feeling the exhaustion down to his bones already.

Winona straightens up and presses her mouth into a thin line. “It’ll be twenty-five years tomorrow,” she says and she doesn’t say what ‘it’ is and she doesn’t have to, because Jim knows that the two of them wear the weight of those years like no one else. “They’re having a ceremony.”

Jim slouches deeper into the pile of pillows on the bed. “Yeah, I know,” he mumbles. “They’ve been announcing it since before I got back.”

“They want us to be there,” Winona says, and she has this way of speaking sometimes that’s like every word is being painstakingly drawn out of her. 

Jim feels something oily settle in his gut. “I’m not going,” he says. “I can’t.”

Winona lets out a breath. “Jim,” she says, that perfect disappointed mother tone she slips on and off like costumes.

“ _Mom_ ,” Jim says and hates how pained he sounds. “You know why I can’t.”

“They’re going to honor you, Jim, for the work you did on the _Farragut_ ,” she says, like this is what will get him to go, like she doesn’t really know him at all. 

Jim lets out an exasperated laugh. “Mom, I’m a _cadet_. All I did on that ship was do chores no one else wanted to do,” he says. “They’re only doing this because—”

“Because it’s an important mission,” Winona interrupts, and Jim can feel that tension between the rising, the places where they’ve always chafed for being too similar, for dealing with their hurts in the same ways. “Everyone on that mission will be honored, but they’d like to honor you tomorrow.”

Jim scrubs a hand over his face and shakes his head. “I can’t go,” he says, his voice coming out soft and defeated. 

And Jim expects her to say something else, to parry back at him like she always does, because sometimes this seems to be the only thing they’re consistently good at as a family, this tossing back and forth of carefully distant words until one of them leaves or gets tired. But when Jim looks at his mother again, he sees her frowning at him, and the creases around her eyes look deeper than he last remembered. He wonders if she’s been getting enough sleep lately, knowing that she’ll work herself half to death trying to prove that she’s more than her last name too. She looks down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap, and when she looks back up, Jim almost has to catch his breath, because it’s like he’s actually looking at his mother, just this once, just for an instant, her usually carefully guarded expression cracked open into something vulnerable and desperate. Jim thinks sometimes about how hard she was when he was growing up, how it always felt like she had sharp edges and careful lines drawn around her, and he thinks, too, that it’s probably been a defense mechanism all this time, like his deliberate anonymity in Iowa, like his need to get every emotion out through his fists. 

“Jim,” Winona says quietly, and her voice shakes just slightly. “Please. I can’t go there alone.”

Jim realizes with a sickening jolt that he’s never once asked his mother what it’s like for her on his birthday, on the day of her husband’s death, on the day she fell in love with her new baby boy and lost the love of her life. He thinks maybe he always assumed that she’d tell him if she wanted to, because she’s his mother, at the end of the day, and he’s always thought that gripes and rough edges aside, there was an understanding between them, that they were the only two people in the world who would truly get how the other felt. But he never asked, and she never said, and looking at her now, her usually stoic front broken open into sincere grief, Jim wonders how he ever thought that it wasn’t his place.

“Okay,” Jim says, feeling tired and sorry and heavy. “Okay, okay, I’ll go.”

Winona nods then and Jim can see her expression carefully shuttering up, the pieces of her meticulously cultivated calm veneer sliding back into place, and Jim thinks _There she goes_ , wondering when the next time he’ll really see her will be. She takes a deep breath and when she looks back up at Jim, it’s like he’s staring at a stranger again, this woman that the rest of Starfleet sees, unshaken by death and tragedy, always strong in the face of adversity, always looking forward and never looking back. Jim sighs and looks away.

Bones comes back some minutes later with coffees for all three of them, and he makes a good show of making small talk with Winona about her recent missions and Starfleet’s new policies regarding new technology patents, and Winona is as warm and polite as she’s expected to be before she bids them goodbye with a promise to see Jim tomorrow, and as she leaves, Bones sits back in his seat and lets out a big breath that puffs out his cheeks. He raises his eyebrows at Jim. 

“She’s something else,” he says, and there’s no judgment in his voice, just the impression that Winona Kirk tends to leave, the impression of a human hurricane.

Jim huffs out a laugh that isn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah,” he says. He looks down at his hands noticing that he’s been picking anxiously at his cuticles for some time now without realizing it. “They’re having a ceremony tomorrow. For the _Kelvin_.”

Jim thinks, sometimes, that talking about the _Kelvin_ is easier than talking about his strange, broken family. Puts some distance. It probably says something about him, he supposes, but he doesn’t really think about it. 

“You going to go?” Bones asks, his voice gentle and soft. 

Jim likes how Bones always thinks to ask things like this, because after a lifetime of people just assuming, assuming he’d be like his parents, assuming he’s just a pretty face, assuming he’s coasted by on reputation alone, Bones is probably the first person to ask him what he wants. 

“Yeah,” Jim says, nodding. “My mom’s going. I can’t let her go alone.”

Jim thinks about his mother, running off to space, facing the great unknown, trying to keep what little of her family she had left together, and all of it alone. He thinks about how they, the remaining members of the Kirk family, have gotten so good at solitude, at going it alone because they’ve long since gotten used to the idea that they can’t depend on anyone to be there for long. He thinks about his mother sometimes and imagines her on her own out there, a tiny speck in the vastness of space, and he wonders if she feels as lonely and small as he does sometimes. This at least, he thinks, she won’t have to do alone. This at least, he can do for her. 

Bones nods and in this light, his eyes look more amber than the pale green they sometimes are. “Okay,” he says. “Then I’ll be there too.”

Sometimes Jim wonders how he made it so long without someone like Bones.

\---

The morning passes in a blur. Bones helps Jim dress in his Academy reds, helps him smooth out the wrinkles in his coat and neatly press his pants, and it’s Bones who makes Jim eat and drink something before they head out, bright and shiny and new in their matching uniforms, lest he pass out while the ceremony happens, because Bones knows that Jim managed to sleep only a few fitful hours the night before, despite still being bone-tired from his lingering illness and the anxiety surrounding his birthday. Bones walks Jim to the big amphitheater where they’re conducting the remembrance ceremony and he sits close enough to the stage that Jim can see him easily through all the people gathered when he stands in front next to his mother. In the back of his mind, Jim knows that various Starfleet admirals and captains who in the past had served alongside the crew of the _Kelvin_ , and more importantly George Kirk, give speeches about the bravery and sacrifice of Captain Kirk to save his crew, and Jim vaguely registers someone pinning a medal on his coat and making another speech about his work on the _Farragut_ , but the whole time, Jim feels like he’s outside of his own body. The sounds in the amphitheater feel tinny and faraway, like he’s hearing it all through a thick fog, and his vision blurs around the edges, like every part of him is trying not to register what’s going on. 

It’s over in a whir that seems to rush and drag at the same time, and suddenly, Jim is thrown back into his body by a wall of sound, people coming to shake his hand, his mother’s firm hand on his shoulder like she’s trying to center him, like she’s trying to center herself. Jim supposes the two of them, together, are always trying to find the solid ground around them and always trying to be enough on their own at the same time. And then suddenly, Bones appears by Jim’s side, nudging him with an elbow to let Jim know that he’s here, and Jim stares in awe of Bones, who must’ve elbowed his way unceremoniously past the various Starfleet officials who surround Jim, who’s standing by Jim with his arms crossed and an eyebrow raised, surveying the crowd around them like he doesn’t give a single damn that everyone here outranks him by a long shot, who doesn’t care that it isn’t his place to be up here because it _is_ his place. Jim feels the prickling on his skin settle a little and he plasters on a fake bright smile and accepts thanks that aren’t his to accept for a sacrifice he never chose to make. 

When it all dies down and everyone has filed away, save for a handful of admirals who murmur to each other in twos and threes, Winona turns to Jim and Jim could almost cry, a sob hitched high in his throat, because she looks as wrecked as he feels, her always careful front of tight control slipping down into something broken and open and sad. Jim wonders why she can’t be like this more, around him at least, because this is the kind of person Jim thinks he could get to know, but then he thinks of himself, of his own carefully constructed walls and defenses and thinks that maybe after you lose something so big, everything starts to feel like a threat. 

“Mom,” Jim says quietly, so quietly that he doesn’t think she hears it, but she smiles just a little at him and reaches out to pull him towards her. One of her hands rests at the back of his neck and the other rubs his back like she used to hug him when he was a kid and couldn’t banish the demons of his own loneliness, and he’s taller than her now, just slightly, but he still feels small and scared. 

“Thank you,” she says softly, and she sounds a little like she wants to say _I’m so proud of you_ or maybe _I love you_. 

When she pulls away, drawing her composure together again, Jim shoves his hands in his pockets and asks, “When are you going back?”

Winona takes a deep breath. “Tonight,” she says, straightening up her shoulders. “My crew is waiting at a starbase for me. I have to get back.”

And Jim knows this, knows that his mother flits in and out of places like she can’t bear to stay in one place for too long, and he gets that she has a job to do at the end of the day, but it doesn’t stop him from deflating, just a little. But she smiles again and promises she’ll be back to see him before he graduates, and he supposes it’s a start. Maybe, he thinks, this is her trying to build the bridges she avoided after his father’s death. 

Winona leans around Jim to extend a hand to Bones and offer, “It was nice to meet you, Leonard.”

Bones cracks a smile for her, and Jim recognizes it as the one Bones wears when he’s trying to be extra charming and somehow it makes him seem more southern than usual. “Likewise, Commander Kirk,” he says.

And here, she should probably say _Please, call me Winona_ or at least _I hope to see you again_ or some other nicety, but instead, she just smiles and nods at the two of them, that careful distance always, always, turning to sneak out before any of the lingering people pull her aside to talk, not that Jim expected anything else of her. He lets out along breath and lets his shoulders sag, tired from standing at attention for so long with the eyes of so many people on him, and he thinks that all he wants to do is lie down and disappear for a while. Jim feels the weight of Bones’ arm slipping around his shoulders, and when he looks up, Bones’ face is calm and kind where Jim feels entirely unraveled. 

“Come on, kid,” Bones says, tugging Jim along, away from the amphitheater, away from the memory of the family he’s never had, away from the wreckage he was born into. “Let me buy you lunch.” 

Bones pulls Jim to their favorite out of the way taco shop, this little place they found on a rainy afternoon when they’d both missed lunch and just wanted to get somewhere warm and dry, this little place they kept coming back to because they had the best fish tacos either of them had ever had and it was always bustling and lively and warm and the family that runs it sometimes gives them an extra taco or two on the house for being so loyal. Bones sits Jim down and gets him his usual order and makes him eat, and then Bones brings Jim back to their room and peels him out of his reds and bundles him in blankets in bed and turns the lights off. Jim doesn’t sleep, tired as he is, because he can never sleep on his birthday, because it’s like the universe cursed him to suffer through every minute of it every year, but it’s dark and quiet in the room, save for the sound of Bones occasionally shuffling around and humming under his breath, so it’s probably as close as he’s going to get. 

In the evening, Bones goes out and gets food for the two of them and pours Jim a generous glass of the good bourbon. Bones lets Jim eat in bed even though Bones is always the one who complains about crumbs in the bed all the time, and lets them drink in silence afterwards, lets Jim hide from the memory of the day at the bottom of his glass, lets Jim wash away all of his thoughts until he isn’t thinking anymore, until the hollow space in his chest starts to feel less raw, and Jim thinks, for a minute, that maybe, this birthday will turn out to be better than expected. Maybe he can end this birthday on a laugh over a joke that Bones throws at him, maybe he can end his birthday feeling warm and safe. 

But then, it’s getting late and Bones is tucking Jim into bed and making as if to settle down with his PADD like he usually does and get some work done while Jim sleeps, and suddenly, Jim’s loneliness breaks open in his chest and threatens to swallow him whole. He grabs at Bones’ wrist before he can get too far, and Jim can’t help the whimper that escapes his mouth and feels pitiful and small. Bones freezes and looks at Jim with these wide, sad eyes, and for a moment, Jim wonders if Bones will run, because he can feel the electricity in Bones’ skin like Bones’ body is tensing to flee. But then Bones softens and lets out a long breath and slides into bed next to Jim, not even bothering to go through his elaborate bedtime routine, like he knows it can’t wait. 

Jim realizes he’s shaking as Bones eases his arms around Jim and makes soft, soothing noises into Jim’s hair, rubbing soothing circles into his back. Bones doesn’t tell him that everything’s going to be okay and he doesn’t promise that Jim will feel better in the morning, like sleep is the magic cure for everything, but Bones holds Jim nonetheless, and suddenly, just like that, Jim is telling Bones everything. Jim tells Bones about being so alone for so long and about losing and losing and losing everyone who meant anything. Jim tells Bones about growing up with his father’s death constantly looming over him, about his mother’s attempt to rebuild their family again by marrying a man she didn’t love, about how Sam spent all his teen years trying to protect Jim from their step-father’s abuse in their mother’s absence. Jim tells Bones about a trip he took with Sam to go visit their aunt and uncle on what was then the Tarsus IV colony, about how they were so excited to go, to get away from their step-father, about how he had to watch as all of his friends and family died at the hands of a man who still believed in centuries-old, outdated ideologies. Jim tells Bones about being chosen to survive and tells Bones about Sam fighting back against the idea that there was even a choice to make, because how can it be for one person to decide who lives and who dies, and tells Bones about being made to watch as Sam was publicly punished for his insubordination. He tells Bones about helping come up with a plan with a badly injured Sam and trusted friends after that to get a signal out to anyone who would listen and about setting out on the chosen day to carry it out and about waking up later on a MedEvac shuttle and no one looking him in the eye when he asked about his brother. 

“My dad was a hero, and he’s dead,” Jim says, the words coming out thick and clumsy now through heavy sobs into Bones’ chest. “My brother was a hero, and he’s dead. My mom’s a hero, and I don’t think anyone’s seen the real her in twenty-five years. And now everyone wants me to be Starfleet’s hero too. I can’t do it, Bones. I can’t.”

He’s never said any of this out loud before, because he’d always been afraid that saying it would make carrying the weight of it all feel that much more real and weighty, and he can feel the panic rising high in his chest, because this isn’t something he’s ever let himself feel, the dread of having a future he never asked for mapped out for him, the burden of carrying on after the dead, the fear of not living long enough to make everyone else’s sacrifices worth it. And after twenty-five years of holding it all in, practicing at building up walls and compartmentalizing to the nth degree, all Jim can do is cry. 

“You don’t have to, Jim,” Bones says quietly, and he’s warm and soft around Jim like Jim’s still allowed to have good things. “You just have to be you. Everyone else can go to hell.”

Jim clings to Bones like he’s the only thing left keeping Jim tethered to the world, and it must hurt, Jim’s arm’s wrapped so tightly around Bones, his fingertips pressing into Bones’ strong back like he needs a reminder that solid ground still exists, but Bones, who makes a living off of complaining about everything he can think of, doesn’t say a single thing. Jim thinks that he’s never had anyone promise to tell the entire universe to go to hell for him and be so patient about letting him fall apart so he can start to put himself back together. And Jim thinks that for all the bad luck he’s had in his life, he was lucky, at least, in this. 

\---

In January, when the dust settles around Jim’s twenty-fifth birthday and people stop looking at him like the living monument of sacrifice and bravery and honor, armed with his experience on the _Farragut_ , Jim signs up for the Kobayashi Maru again despite the balking looks and advice against it from his professors. Bones rolls his eyes at Jim but doesn’t protest as much as last time when Jim tells him, just sighs and says something like _Good luck with that, kid_ , like he knows by now that once Jim gets set on doing something it’s probably best to get out of his way and just go along with it. Bones does take every opportunity, though, that it’s a horrible idea, repeatedly, because who in the history of the Academy has ever gone back for seconds when it comes to the Kobayashi Maru, and Bones hums and haws when Jim insists that Bones be there for the simulation, because he keeps insisting that he’ll be good and dead before Jim gets him onto a starship, but he never says he won’t come, never tells Jim to pack up and go home, and instead stays up with Jim while Jim tries to remember everything he learned on the _Farragut_. 

Jim studies for weeks, if only to prove to himself that he’s learned so much more since he last took the test, and then he goes out and drags Bones and Gaila and Sora to go take the test with him, never mind that two of the three of them were there last time, never mind that they all give him the same sort of eye roll and speech about how he won’t pass because he’s not supposed to pass. And if you asked him, Jim probably couldn’t tell you if he truly expects to pass or not, but it’s like now that he’s got his feet on the ground and he’s been out there and he’s seen the endless expanse of space up close and personal, he can’t find it in him to stop. Because Jim knew the day he enlisted that he’s going to be a captain someday if it’s the last thing he does. Because Jim knows about losing and losing and losing and he never wants to feel that way again. 

Jim fails, again, and he vows to retake it, again, and Bones takes him out for drinks, again. This time Gaila tags along because her girlfriend, Tora, is out of town for the weekend and Gaila wants something to occupy her time. The tattoo that started to appear on her skin last spring is fully formed now, dark and neat and clean against her green skin, several concentric circles centered around the inside of her wrist, and she keeps touching a finger to it as she laughs at Jim over her drink.

“You can’t be serious,” Gaila says, laughter high in her voice. “I’ve seen that code, Jim. I’ve helped run that simulation. I even met the guy who wrote it once, and he’s crazy brilliant. You can’t beat it. That’s the point.”

Jim smirks at Gaila. “Are you saying I’m not crazy brilliant?” he says, waggling his eyebrows.

Next to him, Bones rolls his eyes and mutters under his breath, “Christ.”

Gaila snorts. “Look,” she presses on, “Every aspect of the Kobayashi Maru is designed to be unbeatable. Everyone fails.”

“Then what’s the point?” Jim asks, and he’s mostly just fucking around because he supposes he gets it, on a conceptual level, why they do it, why it’s important, but there’s a part of him that refuses to take that as an answer. 

Gaila lets out an exasperated sigh and pushes back from the table, announcing that she’s buying all of them a round of shots and then she wants to hear nothing more about this godawful test because she’s had enough for one day. Jim watches as she elbows her way past people and disappears towards the bar to flag down a bartender, and Jim wonders if she wants to make it out to the stars herself someday, clever and limitless as she is, and he wonders if he’ll see her out there with him. Next to him, Bones leans back in his seat, his legs splaying wide to press against Jim’s thigh, and as he downs his drink, Jim wonders if Bones will make good on his threat to never in his life board a starship. Jim wonders who will make it out there with him, eventually, when he’s got his own ship and his own crew to look after, and he wonders, then, how he could ever walk away knowing that he could’ve tried to save them all. 

“I can hear you thinking from here, Jim,” Bones says, and when Jim looks over, Bones is eyeing him with a sort of thoughtful look on his face, like he’ll maybe never be able to solve him. 

Jim lets out a laugh and ducks his chin, looking down at his empty bottle of beer. He’s quiet for a long moment, unsure of how to put the weight in his chest into words, unsure of how to express the dread that seeps into his skin when he thinks about losing more than he already has, about letting down the people who’ll depend on him. 

“How can it not matter?” Jim says. “Passing or failing? What’s the point of a test if there’s no way to win?”

Bones lets out a long breath and shakes his head. He’s quiet for a long moment too, like he doesn’t know how to pull together his thoughts into coherent words, and Jim wonders what fears and worries, besides the obvious, Bones carries with him about his future in Starfleet.

“The point is, Jim, you can’t save everyone,” Bones says finally, slowly, like maybe this is something he’s repeated to himself too, like he’s had to convince himself of this truth too. “And the point is, you have to find a way to make peace with that.”

Jim feels the ragged edges in his chest and the heaviness he carries on his shoulders already, for his father, for Sam, and wonders how a person could possibly bear more than that. “How?” he asks.

Bones frowns at Jim, and somehow, he looks older and more world-weary than he usually does, the crease between his brows deepening, and Jim is reminded suddenly that Bones had a life before this all, a real life and a real job, and that he’s been a doctor for longer than he’s known Jim, that he’s a surgeon by training. Jim wonders, then, if Bones lost patients before, before his dad, before everything went to shit, and he wonders how Bones could possibly have carried on after that, knowing he couldn’t save everyone. Jim wonders and hopes and searches Bones’ face for answers but all he can find is the same relentless persistence that brought Bones to Starfleet in the first place, and Jim thinks _Could it really be that simple?_

Bones looks away. “I don’t know,” he says. “You just keep showing up, and one day, you save someone, you do your job, and it all feels a little less pointless.”

Jim stares at Bones and thinks _There is so much I don’t know_ and thinks _There is so much I have to know_ and thinks _How could I possibly do this without him_. And there’s a second, just a second, when Bones meets Jim’s eyes and Jim stares back that Jim’s breath catches, just so, in his throat and he almost feels like he could cry, and it doesn’t make sense at all, because there’s nothing to cry about, but he feels something bursting to get out of his throat. It’s something he finds he doesn’t have a name for, something that he can’t quite place, just that it starts somewhere deep in his chest and aches.

And then Gaila comes back and the moment shatters around them, and she’s shoving shots at them and cheering and laughing and Bones is laughing and Jim finds himself laughing too, and without knowing why, he finds himself feeling incredibly sad, or perhaps wistful, or perhaps it’s almost akin to nostalgia for something he’s never had. It sits inside him, just underneath his skin, all night, and he can’t figure it out at all.

\---

Jim thinks that perhaps the unlikeliest thing he’s learned from his time spent off-world the previous semester is how much he’s missed the sun. He’s practically starved for it, and he keeps finding every excuse to lay out in the sun, on the grass, on the roof of a building, despite the lingering chill of San Francisco winter. Starships have artificial sunlight, sure, Jim thinks, but it’s nothing like the real thing. And he isn’t quite sure what it is about the sun, but there’s something comforting about it, like it’s a reminder that he’s a real person still, like it’s a reminder that the world still exists when he closes his eyes. He’ll never get to the golden brown he used get to in Riverside in the summers he spent losing himself in the cornfields near his house instead of working the farm like he was supposed to, but after a week or two, he starts to notice the freckles that dust his nose and cheeks begin to darken again, just a little, and feels settled. 

Gaila laughs at the freckles scattered across his shoulders and the back of his neck, and she touches a finger to them one day, torn somewhere between fascinated by the difference between his skin and hers and alarmed by how pale the rest of him has gotten in his time away from real sunlight. They lounge in her bed and she traces a fingertip along the patterns she sees, and they don’t sleep together as much these days, never mind that Gaila and her girlfriend are decidedly not monogamous, never mind that he’s met Tora a number of times by now and everything’s been cleared and okayed by all parties, and that’s fine and that’s not the part of his and Gaila’s friendship he cares about anyways, at the end of the day, but there’s something comforting and cozy about this, right here, and after a stressful week crammed with midterms, it’s nice. 

“Has anyone ever told you that you have spots that look suspiciously like Ursa Major on your right shoulder?” Gaila asks, poking at the place on his skin. 

Jim laughs. “Yeah, that’s a game I used to play as a kid,” he says, the phrase _with my brother_ dying on his tongue before it makes it out of his mouth. “You know, like those old connect-the-dots games. I think I have Cassiopeia somewhere too.”

Gaila hums thoughtfully and pauses at his other shoulder, her fingertips tapping one, two, three dots on his skin in a line. “Sounds like fun,” she says. “Do you still play?”

Jim laughs again, rolling over to face her. Her hand drops to the mattress beneath them. 

“It’s a kid’s game, Gaila,” he says by way of answering. 

Gaila shrugs and rolls onto her back, stretching like a cat. “Do you ever wonder if they’re still there?” she asks. “Or if there’s any new ones?”

Jim furrows his eyebrows, somehow feeling like Gaila’s trying to make a point but completely oblivious to what that point is. “They’re just freckles,” he says. “It’s not a big deal.”

Gaila holds his gaze for a long moment, thoughtful like she can see something in him that he doesn’t know exists inside himself, and she pulls herself up to sit cross-legged in her bed next to Jim. She narrows her eyes at him, chewing on her bottom lip, and Jim wonders sometimes what she sees when she looks at him, wonders what’s going on in that head of hers, with its constantly turning cogs. He wonders if she still sees him as something maybe a little sad and lost like he knows she used to when they first met or if she looks at him and sees the ways he’s filled in the cracks in himself over the years like he hopes he has. Jim lays awake at night sometimes wondering and hoping and praying that he’s not the same hollow shell of a person he was when Captain Pike picked him up off the ground of a bar in Riverside, praying that he’s got more substance now.

“Jim, is everything okay?” Gaila asks, finally, after a measured pause. 

Jim blinks, taken aback. “Uh, yeah,” he says, feeling somehow off-kilter, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “Why?”

Gaila shrugs like it’s no big deal, but the pensive look never leaves her face. “It’s just half the time when you come to me, you come with big questions about the world, about love,” she says. “You can’t blame me for worrying.”

Jim laughs, a little startled. “You know that’s not the only reason I like you, right?” he says, and his tone is light and joking, but part of him wonders if that _is_ what she thinks sometimes. 

Gaila smiles then too, and she looks down at her hands. After a moment, she looks back up, and she asks, “Can I ask you something?”

Jim wonders how she can throw him so off balance with just a simple question. He nods. 

Gaila rolls her shoulders back. “Don’t take this the wrong way, okay?” she says, and Jim braces himself for the worst. “Because I love being your sounding board. I love that you trust me enough to talk to me about things. But why me? I mean, your best friend is arguably as well-versed as I am in love and relationships, and you basically live with him. Why not ask him?”

Jim opens his mouth to respond, but the words don’t come. The thing is, he knows why, if not _why_ why, because he has wondered the same things around Bones, watching the way that Bones rubs irately at the tattoo on his side, watching the way Bones treads carefully around mentions of his ex-wife like he’s afraid of falling apart again, watching the way Bones deliberately rebuilds the parts of his life that crumbled into something more stable again, more certain. But every time Jim thinks to ask, to wonder aloud how a person can do that even once, let alone the many times that Bones has, the questions he has get stuck in his mouth. It’s like, for however close they are, for however much space they share, some sort of void exists around Bones that Jim can’t breach, not for this. And Jim doesn’t know how to explain that feeling, not to Gaila and least of all to himself. 

“Just food for thought,” Gaila says, not waiting for him to answer, or perhaps not needing him to. She pushes herself off the bed and pats Jim’s leg, smiling brightly at him, and says, “Now, I have a problem set to finish and if I’m not mistaken, you have about half an hour to get your forms to Admiral Barnett’s office so you can officially get course credit for last semester’s mission.”

Gaila gathers up her hair into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck and tugs a roomy t-shirt over her head, settling down at her desk to get to work. She offers Jim her shower if he wants it and reminds him to hurry like she worries he’ll forget, and Jim mostly just grumbles about how archaic it is for the Academy to require all of these forms in paper form when it’d be so much quicker to just put it through electronically and who’s fault was it, anyways, that they didn’t get all this bullshit done before the mission. Ten minutes later, he’s trotting across campus to get the administration building, the breeze chilly in his shower-damp hair, and he should be trying to remember how to get to Admiral Barnett’s office, because he’s only ever been there once and that was when he first arrived at the Academy and had to go through the process of being enrolled as a late enlistee, but instead, all he can think about is what Gaila asked him. The question _why_ hovers over his head in big, capital letters, and Jim just thinks _I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know_ , wondering if he’ll ever really know the answers to the big questions he has. 

\---

Later, Jim rationalizes that it’s probably a combination of his recent mission and his failed Kobayashi Maru attempt that’s at the root of it. Later, Jim rationalizes that with his graduation drawing ever nearer, he’s worried on what kind of captain he’s going to be. But it doesn’t make it any better, later, when he keeps waking from nightmares, two, three times a week, sweating and shaking with the screams he can’t let out trapped in his throat. He wakes Bones every time, Bones who wakes confused and disoriented and bleary-eyed but immediately moves to comfort Jim, to wrap his arms around him and still his shaking hands and soothe his heart back down to a normal pace, Bones who holds Jim without asking why or what’s going on, Bones whose hands are steady, always. And it’s like Bones just instinctively knows, like he was always meant to be comforting and caring and making sure that everyone around him knows that they’re safe. 

Jim clutches to the thin fabric of Bones’ t-shirt, bunching up the soft cotton in his hand so tightly he almost worried he might rip the thin fabric. He’s got his head pressed to the curve of Bones’ shoulder where it meets his neck and the image of a faceless crew, a crew that he doesn’t yet have but knows is his, a crew that he knows he’ll be responsible for one day, flashing behind his eyelids, all of them panicked and scared, all of them plummeting to their death in a starship on the brink of explosion, and Bones just sits there and waits it out as Jim heaves the fear out of him in sobs, though his eyes stay dry. Bones rubs Jim’s back with one hand and cradles the back of Jim’s head with the other and murmurs soothing words in Jim’s ear, and Jim doesn’t even really hear what Bones says, just feels the low rumble of Bones’ voice through his chest and feels Bones’ hands steadying him like Bones is solid ground. And Bones never looks at Jim like he’s crazy and never tells Jim that this is all getting annoying, even though Jim’s sure it must be, even though he knows that Bones is extra tired these days staying up, trying to calm Jim down. All Bones does is talk through it with Jim when he wants to and just sits with him in the dark when he doesn’t until the weight in Jim’s chest starts to lift and he can feel himself breathe again. 

Jim loses track of how many times this happens that spring. Sometimes he wonders if it means something, and then he remembers that he doesn’t believe in signs or omens or the higher powers that are supposed to send them. 

“Hey, Bones?” Jim says one night when the blurred panic has receded from his vision and he knows he exists inside his own body again. 

“Hmm?” Bones hums, laying in the bed next to Jim, one knee stuck out to nudge against Jim’s thigh like he’s reminding Jim that he’s still there. 

And Jim wants to find a way to tell Bones that no one has ever done this for him before, that no one has held his hand and sat through breakdown after breakdown with no sign of tiring, that no one has ever put up with him for this long and not gotten tired of him. He wants to say that it’s changed him, he hopes, this kindness that Bones does for him, that it makes him better because he wants to be good enough, because he wants to be the kind of person who deserves to be treated so gently. He wants to say that he’s not really sure where he’d be without Bones, whether he would’ve bottomed out and dropped out a year or two in or if he would’ve gotten cold feet, right there on that shuttle to his new life. Jim wants to say all of this but his mouth refuses to let the words go, so he just takes a deep breath and stares at Bones’ vague silhouette in the darkened room and hopes that he knows. 

“Thank you,” Jim says, and probably means _I’d give you the world to show it_.

Jim hears Bones let out a breath that’s probably a laugh and Bones nudges Jim, just a little. “Go to sleep,” he says, sounding like he’d do all of this again and again if Jim just asked (and the problem then, Jim thinks, is that Jim wouldn’t know how to ask if it hit him in the face, or why).

Jim rolls over onto his side and tugs the blankets up to his chin, and he watches and listens to Bones’ breathing even out as he lets himself sleep now that Jim is calm and centered again, and Jim wonders when he stopped thinking of Bones as cynicism and bitterness and started thinking of him as softness and warmth and home, wonders how he could have ever thought of Bones as something rough and harsh. Jim lets his eyes shut and lets Bones’ steady calm wash over him, sinking deeper into the softness of Bones’ bed. He lets his arm stretch out across the bare inches between them and rests his fingers against Bones’ side, instinctively finding Bones’ tattoo and the slightest raised edge of his scar without meaning to. The cotton of Bones’ shirt is threadbare and wearing through and Jim can feel a spot where a hole is about to form, and he thinks absently that Bones didn’t always wear shirts to sleep, remember Bones saying something about Jim stealing all of the blankets and needing to dress warmer for sleep, but Jim finds himself thinking, at the back of his mind, that a thin shirt really isn’t going to do much to keep him warm. But Jim’s tired after weeks of fitful sleep and Bones is quiet and still beside him, so Jim lets that ground him until any residual tension melts out of his body and sleeps until he forgets the thought altogether.

\---

As much as Jim loves San Francisco, loves its bustle, loves the diversity in its residents and its culture and its food, loves the change from his sleepy Riverside home, he still hasn’t gotten used to how, in the spring, when he thinks it should be warming up, San Francisco stays persistently cold. It doesn’t stop Jim from trying to feel like it’s spring, though, stubbornly wearing t-shirts and trying to find the warmer sunny spots on campus to study and lay out on lazy days. Most days, he goes alone, comfortable enough in his own solitude and tired from a day of classes, and most days, Bones is working besides, racing to finish his dissertation and pulling his required shifts at Medical. But sometimes, Jim feels the weight of his own loneliness in the core of his being and he goes and drags Bones out with him, because sometimes the sun feels just a little bit warmer when he has someone to share it with. 

“You kidding me?” Bones protests when Jim suggests it. “It’s freezing out.”

Jim makes a face at Bones and reaches to grab Bones’ favorite leather jacket. “Bones,” Jim whines, drawing out the vowels in his name. “It’ll be nice.”

Bones stares dubiously at Jim over his PADD, leaning back in his desk chair and frowning like he thinks Jim’s being entirely unreasonable. “Jim, it’s San Francisco,” Bones says, his tone flat and entirely unenthused. “I don’t care how sunny it looks out there; it’s still going to be cold as hell.”

Jim sometimes forgets that Bones grew up in Georgia, forgets that Georgia means long, lazy summers sticky with heat and humidity, bookended by milder springs and falls, forgets that Bones grew up in a place where sun meant sun and that was the beginning and end of everything. But Jim has never lived anywhere where springs have been anything but relentless (except, maybe, the months he spent off-world, except, maybe, he never got to know what spring there was like), and having no surprises in weather except the fog that rolls in, thick and heavy, each morning feels like a luxury still, three years into it all. So Jim tosses Bones’ jacket towards him and grins, rocking back on his heels as Bones grumbles under his breath at him. 

“Fine,” Bones acquiesces, however begrudgingly, “But if you get sick, don’t come running to me.”

Jim laughs and shoves his hands into his pockets, waiting and watching as Bones sighs and stands and gathers himself to go outside. The sleeve of Bones’ t-shirt slides up just so as he’s lifting his arm to slip on his jacket, and Jim catches the bottom edge of a tattoo on Bones’ left arm where he remembers seeing just that vague impression of a tattoo before, except now it’s sharp and dark and defined, like the love has settled somewhere in Bones and won’t leave, but Bones and Marcos broke up almost a year ago and Jim doesn’t think Bones has been dating anyone since, hasn’t seen Bones with anyone else, and Jim wonders if it’s possible to keep falling in love with someone even after the relationship ends. Because Jim can’t make sense of it, can’t figure out how Bones could have a new tattoo when there’s been no one new in his life since Marcos, can’t figure out how the tattoo could be so clear now when it was so vague before. But then Bones puts his jacket on and Jim loses sight of the tattoo, and Jim wonders if it was all in his head.

“You okay?” Bones asks, and his voice is careful and quiet and his eyes are thoughtful like Jim’s been staring a little too long. 

Jim blinks away spots in his vision and looks down at his shoes. “Yeah,” he says, and then straightens up and pulls a smile to his face, hating how forced it feels, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Bones looks at Jim like he doesn’t believe him, like he’s searching Jim’s face for the answer to a question Jim doesn’t know. But then Bones nods and grabs his PADD and shoos Jim out of the room so they can go out to the sun like Jim wanted, and Jim thinks maybe that was all in his head, too. 

\---

There are times that Jim thinks, maybe, he’s probably a bad person at his core, buried somewhere beneath all of his attempts to be good, to be better. There are times, he thinks, that it doesn’t surprise him that he doesn’t have more people he’s close to, because in the end, maybe he doesn’t deserve to. Jim figures out late in the spring how he’s going to beat the Kobayashi Maru and immediately hates himself a little for even thinking of it, because it means going against everything he believes in, because it means taking advantage of his friends in a way that he promised himself he’d never do. 

It starts when Gaila mentions to him that she’ll be helping run the simulation for the remainder of the semester, and she probably means it to be a deterrent for his asking her to be a part of his crew again, but the thought plants itself firmly in Jim’s mind, like it’s waiting for a moment to become useful. And it’s probably telling that Gaila bothered mentioning it in the first place, operating under the assumption that Jim’s probably going to stubbornly take the test again, unable to take no for an answer, and Jim should probably think about what that means about him, but all that Jim can think about, in the days and weeks that follow, is the fact that Gaila will be there next time, on the other side of that glass, deploying the program that’s proven to be impossible to beat. He thinks about and thinks, perhaps shamefully, that it could come in handy. 

He starts writing a program later that week, and signs up for an open spot to take the Kobayashi Maru several weeks down the line, right before the end of the spring term. He’s coming up on his three-year promise to Captain Pike, he thinks, but Jim doesn’t know if he can do it – if he can captain a ship and accept the responsibility that comes with it, if he can carry the weight of their lives on his shoulders – if he doesn’t know that he can do this, just this, beat this test, this simulation, this thing that isn’t even real. Because if he can’t even protect his fake crew in his fake ship in this make-believe scenario, how can he know that he can do it when it really counts? Because he’s lost enough people in his life, and he needs to know that he can do this one good thing in his life, that he can make sure he doesn’t lose anyone else. And he doesn’t know if that justifies taking advantage of Gaila’s position in the Kobayashi Maru like this or not, or if it justifies writing a virus that’ll allow him to beat the system, but every time Jim thinks about the time that he’s been here, thinks about the promise he made to Pike and to himself, to be better, to do better, to make something of himself instead of just hiding in anonymity for fear of being turned into a stereotype, and Jim feels the oppressive anxiety creep up around him and threaten to crush him. So Jim writes his virus, and in the moments in between, he tries to imagine a world in which he didn’t become this person, in which he was always happy and whole and loved, in which he didn’t develop the habit of looking over his shoulder every other second fearing that the tragedy he escaped as an infant and again as a young teenager has finally caught up with him.

\---

There’s a day in the spring, and Jim doesn’t realize it at the time, but it changes everything. He wakes up and he goes to class and he teaches his combat class to first years, and it should just be like every other day, but it isn’t. That day, Jim wakes up and goes to class and teaches combat and he goes back to the room that he realizes he’s stopped thinking of as Bones’ room and has started to think of as theirs. And maybe it’s because he runs into Gaila and Tora on his way back to the room or because he got a message from his mother earlier that morning or because Jim woke up that day feeling like he was running out of time and thinking to himself _Almost three years now, and what do you have to show for it?_ But whatever it is, he returns to his room after leading the combat class feeling hyper-aware of his own body, feeling like he’s about to burst out of his own skin, and all he can think is that he needs a shower and maybe he needs to sleep for the next week. 

The warm water soothes him but the spray of it against his skin makes his nerves sing so that by the time he steps out of the shower, he feels clean but no less settled. And Jim isn’t the type of person to believe in signs or omens or higher powers, but he can’t ignore that it feels like his entire body is on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He supposes, in hindsight, that’s maybe why he stares at himself in the mirror after he’s stepped out of the shower whereas he’d normally just breeze out to get dressed and then flop down on the bed to maybe take a quick nap before starting in on his work. And it’s weird, because Jim isn’t one to really look at himself in the mirror, because he’s never really cared what he’s looked like because everyone around him only saw one thing anyways, but today, Jim feels himself drawn to the mirror for a reason he can’t put his finger on. 

It’s been a while since Jim has looked at himself properly, and he’s surprised to find that the person he finds staring back at him is someone he thinks he’d actually like to be. His eyes look less hollow and his cheeks less sunken than he remembers from the last time he really looked at himself, the day he got to the Academy years ago, wondering who he thought he could be in this place where all the expectations were already set out for him, wondering how he could be anything other than a son chasing his father’s ghost. His cheeks are flushed from the shower and his hair is towel-dry messy and the dusting of freckles across his shoulders that Gaila paid such close attention to weeks ago has gotten darker since. He tries smiling a little at himself and feels warm. He wonders if, three years ago, he would’ve imagined that this was possible. 

Jim’s just turning to wander back out into the room, feeling for once satisfied and whole, when something in his reflection catches his eye. Jim pauses and leans closer to the mirror to peer at his own shoulder, right at the curve of it, just over the top of it so that it’s on his back, a few freckles that don’t look like freckles at all. They’re darker, black like ink instead of brown like a darker shade of skin, and they’re more defined and they form almost a completely straight line, three in a row, and Jim feels his stomach drop. Because he’s seen this tattoo. Because he’s talked about this tattoo, what it means, who has it. The belt of Orion. The ellipse. Bones’ tattoo on his shoulder, _his_ shoulder – Jim who never falls in love, Jim who never gets attached, Jim who has perfected the art of not letting himself feel the thing that destroyed his mother’s life (because he’s seen too much, felt too much of the aftermath, and he knows and he knows and he _knows_ that he’s made of the same stuff as his mother, knows that it means he’s too soft and too tender at his core and so he’s learned to make himself barbed and rough around the edges like her, too).

Jim stares in disbelief at the tattoo on his shoulder, breathless panic rising high in his throat, and he remembers, vaguely, Gaila tapping his shoulder with her fingertips, one, two, three in a row, and wonders frantically how long it’s been there. How long has he not known? How long has he been vulnerable? How long has the universe been conspiring against him to shove him into something he’s not sure he’s okay with feeling, something he’s not even sure he feels at all? 

And then Jim thinks about Bones – Bones who is so careful with his heart, who Jim has only seen try to date one person in their time at the Academy, who for all Jim can figure is warm and kind and loving but probably not the kind of loving towards Jim that leaves a permanent mark on the body. Jim thinks about Bones and thinks about the way Bones talks about his exes, about Jocelyn, about the love Jim sees in Bones still, buried and locked away somewhere safe where it won’t eat him alive, and Jim wonders what Bones says about him when he’s not there. Jim wonders if he’s worth talking about like that, if it’s even possible that Bones, with his infinite patience and persistence and quiet, unassuming wisdom, could feel that way about Jim one day. And it’s not even like Jim’s even admitting to himself that he has feelings for Bones, because even now, still, with the proof staring him in the face like the world’s about to crash down around him, all Jim can feel is fear. But Jim wonders. Wonders and panics, panics and wonders. And all he can think at the end of it all is _shit, shit, shit, no, fuck_ in an endless litany, because isn’t this exactly what Jim’s been trying to protect himself from his entire life? Isn’t this exactly Jim’s worst nightmares playing out in front of him? Isn’t this exactly the worst case scenario he’s played out in his head over and over and over? 

Jim doesn’t realize that he’s cursing aloud until he hears Bones’ voice from the room outside call out to him, cutting through his thoughts, clear like a bell, clear like Jim could recognize it anywhere. Bones, who must’ve just gotten back from class. Bones, who has always been, undeniably, attractive and witty and charming, even if any of his flirting has never been directed at Jim. Bones, who Jim won’t admit to himself that he might be a little bit in love with.

“Jim?” Bones calls out, his voice deeper like it gets when he’s concerned. “You okay?”

Jim stares at himself in the mirror, at his now ashen face, at the anxiety apparent in every inch of his posture, the stiffness in his shoulders, the tenseness of his back, and thinks to himself _How will I ever be okay again, knowing this? Knowing and not being able to do anything?_ Jim stares at himself and feels his teeth chatter, feels his hands gripping the edge of the sink, feels the tightness in his chest, and then he forces himself down. 

“Yeah,” Jim calls back, his voice still just slightly too high from the adrenaline but as normal as he can get it, considering. “It’s, uh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

There’s rustling not too far outside the bathroom door like Bones is pacing, maybe, or debating about whether to come in. “You sure?” Bones says. “You sounded pretty worked up.”

Jim takes a measured, deep breath, counting to five on the inhale and exhale, and then repeats it, and again and again until he feels less like his heart is going to burst out of his body and a little more like he can face the world again. Jim tightens the towel around his waist and goes to walk out of the bathroom, summoning the most genuine smile he can manage as the door slides open. Bones stands across the room from him, arms crossed and eyebrows furrowed, and Jim just knows without having to think about it that Bones is incredibly worried on his behalf and immediately feels guilty. Jim crosses his own arms and leans against the doorframe. 

“Seriously, Jim,” Bones says, and then pauses. A moment later he says, like he’s afraid of being shut out entirely, “You know you can talk to me if something’s wrong, right?”

For the first time, Jim looks at Bones, really looks at him, armed with the knowledge of the tattoo on his shoulder, and for a moment, he can’t even breathe. Because he looks at Bones and all of the panicked questions he had for himself melt away for an instant and feel somehow insignificant, because Bones is so grounded and solid and there, always, despite how many times Jim has fucked up, despite how many times Jim thought Bones would walk away, and more than that, Bones is so incredibly warm and tender with Jim, lets him see all the places he’s been ripped raw like he lets no one else see, like Jim is worth it. Jim looks at Bones’ broad shoulders and square jaw and the soft grey-green of his eyes, and he thinks about Bones’ steady hands that have been so careful with Jim’s hurts, the cuts and bruises he’s gotten from fights and the things that run deeper, the things he keeps hidden away under layers of carefully enacted bravado and charm. He thinks about how when he thinks of Bones and the Academy and here, this room, he always thinks of belonging, and he thinks about having a place to feel safe for perhaps the first time in his life. And it’s a little like the pieces of Jim’s life suddenly click into place and he has a name for all the things he felt and ignored, all the things he felt and couldn’t name. Jim thinks about the way his chest ached when he saw the new tattoo on Bones’ arm and the warm safeness of sharing a bed with Bones, always with some point of contact anchoring Jim firmly in the world, and the anxiety of launching out into space and leaving Bones behind. Jim looks at Bones now and every inch of his skin hurts and he thinks _How could I_ and thinks _How could I not_ and thinks _But how could he, too, feel the same?_

“Jim?” Bones says, his voice breaking through the haze in Jim’s head to focus him down to a single point. 

Jim blinks and looks away, feeling warm again for all the reasons he’s never admitted to himself. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know, Bones.”

Bones frowns at Jim like he doesn’t believe a single thing Jim’s saying, but Jim pushes past him anyways to get to the closet and find something to wear, feeling suddenly too exposed and vulnerable and raw. He dresses, still all too aware of his own body, and wonders how he’s going to live with Bones now, with the knowledge of this looming over him, and wonders how he could ever live without Bones now, because when he even tries to imagine it, he feels the hollow place in his chest threaten to swallow him whole. 

\---

Jim wonders, not for the first time, if it always happens like this, if the feeling comes first and then the realization comes later. Jim wonders what it would’ve been like to know, going into it, that it was maybe always going to be this way. Jim wonders, in the days that follow, how Bones can carry so many tattoos with him every day, because Jim physically feels heavier, feels his left shoulder sagging under the weight of Bones’ tattoo, and he thinks he understands now why Bones could never forget about the tattoo on his side, why Bones always touched it like it reminded him of why he was here. 

He fights it first, because his first instinct is always to fight, to grit his teeth and push back, because Jim has a bad habit of thinking that he can win if he just has enough determination and brute force. He fights it, because it’s not like he asked for this, because it’s not like this was ever part of his plan, and he figures that if he knows it, then maybe he can beat it, because now he has a name and a thing to fight against, because no one ever told him that love has a way of planting itself and not letting go. He fights it and fights it and fights it until he wears himself out and can’t find the energy in himself to fight anymore, because as much as Jim is made of the kind of persistence that refuses to give up, he looks up days later and realizes that he has nothing to show for his time except a kind of bone-dry exhaustion, and the ache in his chest feels heavier than he can ever remember it being. And finally, finally, Jim figures that there’s maybe nothing he can do, that maybe this is one fight he can’t win, and it goes against everything he believes in, and he can’t make sense of it at all. 

So Jim tries on the weight of it sometimes when Bones isn’t around, tries balancing out his shoulders, tries being the type of person who can love and not fear. He tries thinking it to himself when he’s alone, and at first it’s like he’s trying to scare himself, his heart racing at the thought of it and a lump getting caught in his throat, and it terrifies him so badly he wonders if he’ll ever be able to breathe again. And then he thinks about Bones’ fear of flying and remembers all those months they spent just getting Bones near shuttles, sitting in them, and then finally, finally, taking one out on a test flight, and then again for longer, and then again and again until Bones could stand it for the whole route, even if his anxiety went up a couple notches as the shuttle rattled against minor turbulence, even if Bones’ hands were white-knuckled from clutching to the railing. And Jim remembers something Gaila said to him years ago now – _Love is not a poison_ – and tries to take it to heart, tries to keep trying, hating that even just the thought of it can shake him down to his core, hating that if he even accidentally thinks of the tattoo on his shoulder his vision tunnels out, and all he can think when he brings himself down from the shaking hands and ragged breathing is that it can’t be like this, that it’s a weakness, that it’s a blind spot he can’t allow. Because it might not be a poison, and it might not be the death of him, but he can’t do a single thing about it and at the end of the day, it’s something that others can take advantage of.

Jim thinks it and thinks it and thinks it until he stops flinching, until he feels his heartbeat quicken in his chest without the dread welling up in his stomach along with it, until it stops feeling like a burden. And then one night, he’s trying to sleep, all too aware of where Bones’ thigh is pressed up against his, all too aware of the bare inches between them, and he’s just trying to focus on the sound of Bones’ breathing to settle his nerves and lull him to sleep and the thought crosses his mind, and his heart catches in his throat and something warm and almost luxurious unfurls in his chest, and Jim thinks, _Oh_. Jim thinks, _Is this what it’s supposed to feel like?_ Thinks, _Is this what other people feel all the time?_ Thinks, _Is this what I’ve been running from all this time?_ Because stripped bare of the worries that Jim has harbored perhaps his entire life, because after practicing at setting aside the blinding panic, Jim almost feels like he’s being filled with light, like anything is possible, like he could be untouchable if he just held on hard enough, and this is maybe what he’s felt all along, without realizing it, burying it under layers and layers of self-preservation. Jim gasps aloud, stunned.

Before Jim can think about what’s happening, Bones is waking up next to him and, still half-asleep and probably not entirely aware of what’s happening, wrapping himself around Jim as if on instinct, rubbing his back and murmuring something that might be gentle, comforting words if Bones were awake enough to say them properly, and Jim realizes that he’s crying, his cheeks already soaked with tears. Part of him wants to laugh in that moment, but all that comes out are heaving sobs, and Jim doesn’t know what to make of it, because he doesn’t feel that same painful tugging in his chest that he usually gets when he cries, because even though he can’t stop, he doesn’t feel empty and hollowed out like he usually does. Instead, he feels like he’s full to bursting of an unknown something, like it all needs to come out in one way or another, and Jim realizes perhaps too late that what he’s feeling is sheer happiness, pure and simple and uncomplicated and so intense that Jim doesn’t think he’ll ever forget it. 

_You have to tell him_ , Jim finds himself thinking as Bones’ breath evens out beside him and the sobs subside into a gentle shuddering in his chest, because living with the weight of it all trapped in his chest is one thing he can’t do alone. And the thought surprises him, because he never planned on this either, because saying aloud would make it too real, but he finds himself thinking despite himself, _These aren’t secrets that can be kept, not from him, not like this_. And maybe, Jim thinks, maybe this is the truer mark of how much time it’s been since he was that scared kid in Riverside running from his past, more than the classes he’s taken or the exams he’s passed or the mission he went on. Maybe, Jim thinks, this means that he’s finally ready to commit to something and see who he can be when he grows up. 

And then Jim thinks about how his appointment to take the Kobayashi Maru is only days away now, about how much he still needs to get done because he’s wasted so much time thinking about the tattoo on his shoulder, about how he needs Bones there on that bridge, about how he can’t scare him off yet, and Jim promises to himself, _After this is all over. After I pass, then I’ll tell him_.

Because how was he supposed to know what would come next, anyways?

\---

Looking back, it feels like a blur. Looking back, Jim feels like the day passes in fast-forward, with pauses only in the places that matter. Being brought up in Academy court for cheating. Not hearing his name called with everyone else’s. Bones coming back for him anyways. Seeing the _Enterprise_ for the first time. _Bones_ pointing it out to him, staring out the shuttle window like the great expanse of space isn’t all around them, ready to swallow them whole at a moment’s notice.

Jim remembers running through the corridors to find Uhura, thinking only _She’s the only one who knows the truth_ , remembers running through the corridors with Bones and Uhura both trailing behind him, thinking only _I am not going to die like my father_ , thinking only _I can’t die like my father, not now, not after so much_ , thinking only _But what if I do? Will they sing songs about me too? Will there be anyone left to remember me?_

Jim remembers getting beamed down to Vulcan and scrambling for his life on a drill platform that doesn’t feel bigger than a saucer between dodging punches thrown his way and trying get enough footing to get a hit in without falling off the edge. Jim remembers watching Spock beam back with the surviving members of the Vulcan elders, one hand still reaching out to a mother and a planet and a life that doesn’t and can’t exist anymore. Jim remembers helping usher them all to Medbay, remembers hearing someone along the way say something about one of the medical decks being hit, remembers the immediate, heart-stopping panic and thinking _He can’t die, not here like one of his worst nightmares, not now before I get a chance to say something, anything that matters_. But then Jim gets to Medbay, and there Bones is, stern-faced and sure-handed, running triage like they aren’t in the middle of space, like he didn’t just see his life flash before his eyes. Jim wonders how he can stand it, and then finds himself thinking that Bones is probably a lot more incredible than even Jim’s ever given him credit for. Bones is directing his staff to get all the patients – the refugees from Vulcan, the crew members injured in the initial attack, the ones who were injured trying to keep the ship afloat afterwards, and, miraculously, Jim thinks, a few cadets here and there who he could’ve sworn were assigned to different ships in that hangar – into some sort of order, shouting orders over the commotion and the mourning like he was born to do it, and Jim stares, stuck in the doorway, completely thrown off by the vision of a future he’s probably been dreaming of for years now, because here’s Bones, stepping up into his role as CMO as easy as breathing with no hesitation at all, reservations about space be damned. 

Somehow, even though Medbay is so packed with people that Jim can barely move without bumping into someone, Bones pauses in the middle of directing the flow of traffic around him and he catches Jim’s eye, and Jim sees Bones let out a visible breath of relief, like part of him truly believed that he might never see Jim again, and Jim feels something in his chest crack open. He’s running towards Bones before he can even think and he’s throwing his arms around Bones and he doesn’t catch himself saying over and over _Oh god, you’re okay, oh thank god, thank god_ until the words have already left his mouth. And Jim would probably find it in himself to regret it, the unguarded honesty and raw emotion spilling out of him, but he just almost died himself and Bones is hugging him back besides, his hands uncharacteristically shaky as he wraps his arms around Jim’s waist. 

Jim remembers hearing Uhura’s familiar voice cry out and seeing her rush by, hands clasped over her mouth, following a gurney being rushed to the intensive care section, and when Jim looks closer, he sees that it’s Gaila laying on that bed, that it’s Gaila who must’ve just gotten rescued from the wreckage of one of the other ships, that it’s Galia who the staff is shouting at to each other about radiation exposure and shrapnel wounds, and one of the nurses promises to Uhura that Gaila’s an Orion and that means different biology and different biology means that Gaila might be more resilient in the face of radiation, but Uhura needs to give them space, needs to let them work, and Jim thinks to every higher power he doesn’t believe in, _Thank you, at least, for this_. 

Jim remembers trying to fend off Bones, who wants to patch up all of Jim’s hurts right then and there like he always does, and he remembers thinking that this isn’t over yet, that there has to be more to Nero’s plan, that there’s something he’s missing and he has to be on that bridge to tell the others, remembers trying to explain it to Bones, who doesn’t or can’t listen, who keeps scanning Jim over like he’s afraid of the worst. He remembers letting Bones at least make sure he hasn’t suffered permanent brain damage from being thrown around so much, letting Bones patch up the worst of Jim’s busted knuckles with long strips of gauze and medical tape and steady, methodical hands, the old-fashioned way, the way Jim thinks Bones likes more if only out of a sense of tradition than anything else, and he remembers Bones promising to get to the bridge as soon as he’s done with his patients. And Jim wants to say it, right then and there, wants Bones to know about the tattoo, about the expansive feeling he’s been carrying with him this whole time, wants to do something, anything, because there’s that fear sitting at the base of Jim’s spine worrying what if this is the last time he sees Bones, worrying what if something happens, worrying what if there is no ‘after’ in this chain of events and Jim never gets to say it. 

Instead, Jim just looks at Bones as Bones finishes bandaging up Jim’s hands, looks at him like he’s trying to memorize the exact angle of Bones’ brow, and he says, hoping that Bones knows that what he says isn’t the beginning and end of everything, that there’s so much more that needs to be said still, “Be safe, okay?” 

Bones looks up at Jim, his hands lingering where they’re tying off the last bandage, and Jim knows that he hears the echo of what Jim said in that hangar, a few hours and a lifetime ago, and Bones looks at Jim like the words have a whole new weight now with the knowledge of the enemy they’re facing looming over them. 

“Yeah,” Bones says, and there might be something in his voice too, something significant, but Jim thinks to himself that he’s probably hearing what he wants to hear, like the last wishes of a doomed man. “Yeah, you too, Jim.”

And as Jim runs back to the bridge, the phantom warmth of Bones’ hands still lingering over his own, he thinks that maybe, it sounded like a promise. 

\---

Jim loses count of how many times he thinks it’s the end of him at the end of the day. He counts once, on Vulcan, and again, on Delta Vega, and again, on the _Narada_ , and numerous other times in between, the barely-dodged shots, the two-inches-to-the-right-and-I’d-be-a-goner punches, the one-wrong-step-and-I’ll-fall-to-my-death ledges. And it’s probably a good thing, in hindsight, that it all happens so quickly that he doesn’t have time to really think, because it’s all just how do I survive this situation and this and this, and on and on until Jim finds Pike and Scotty beams them back to the ship and Jim sees Spock there on that transporter pad next to him, and then finally, amidst the commotion in the transporter room – Scotty cheering about the impossible feat he just pulled off with the engineering support staff and various medical personnel rushing in and the general buzz of information traveling out from the room and down the halls of the ship _Pike is back, he’s back and he’s alive, and Kirk and Spock did it, they’re back and they all survived_ – Jim hears Bones voice cut through the crowd, the voice Jim thinks he’d recognize anywhere and anytime and at the end of the world, if that’s what it comes to.

“Jim!” Bones calls out, his voice low but urgent, and that’s it, just _Jim_ and nothing else, but Jim feels the grin on his face widen anyways into something warm and full, feels his chest swell as he thinks, finally, _I am not going to die out here and neither is he_ and thinks, _Maybe there’s still time for us yet_. 

And Jim has every intention of speeding them back to Earth just like that and finding Bones as soon as they land and telling him, about the tattoo on his shoulder, about the feeling trapped just under the surface of his skin, about how in the wake of this all, all this near-death and seemingly endless destruction, Jim knows now, fully and truly, that Bones is the single most important person in Jim’s life and he’d give it all up, all of it – being captain, his career in Starfleet, the ship, and all the infinite unknowns of space – to just have Bones by his side. But then he has to deal with Nero and the ship almost gets swallowed whole by the blowback from the red matter and in between escaping the black hole and arriving back on Earth to more fanfare than Jim ever expected, he runs out of time, because by the time they dock, Bones is back in Medbay, ushering all of his patients, Pike and Gaila among them, to medical transport shuttles and Jim is being swept off to his own shuttle with the rest of the bridge crew, and when his feet land back on solid ground again after what’s probably only been a day or so but feels like a lifetime, Jim hasn’t the slightest idea where Bones even is, much less how to get him alone to talk to him. The press is already there when the bridge crew touches down, and a flank of admirals greet them as they disembark, shaking their hands and thanking them for their incredible service, and there are way too many people and way too many voices shouting one over the other, and as Jim cranes his neck, searching in vain for Bones’ familiar flop of soft brown hair, it feels like he sees everyone but him instead. Jim sees Christine Chapel wheeling Pike away on a gurney, flanked by security on both sides to push through the throngs of people trying to get a peek at the fallen captain, and he sees Sarek and the other Vulcan elders being likewise led through the crowd to the temporary housing that’s already been hastily arranged for them, and Jim even spies Cupcake, leading one of the many groups of Vulcan refugees from one of the shuttles to housing and Medical as needed as well. 

“It was like this too when you arrived on Earth for the first time,” a familiar woman’s voice slices through Jim’s thoughts, cool and calm like the dark center of a lake. “Though your story has a far happier ending this time around.”

Jim jerks around and finds his mother smiling at him like she thought she might never see him again, still dressed in her science blues like she’s just rushed back from whatever mission she’s been on the past few months to make sure he gets back alive and in one piece. Jim wonders if it’s always going to be like this, still, if it’ll still take the big things like the twenty-fifth anniversary of his father’s death or Jim narrowly escaping the same fate to bring her back to Earth, or if things will be different now that Jim has dealt with his father’s killer. Jim wonders if they’ll be able to start building something more real now that the specter of the _Kelvin_ ’s destruction is no more. 

“Mom,” he breathes out, because he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say, because the two of them don’t have a language for things like this. 

She lets out a breath and her shoulders relax from their rigid straightness, just a touch. She smiles again, and somehow it feels more real than anything she’s ever done, and Jim feels something like hope swell inside of him, and he finds himself thinking that maybe now, his real life can finally start. 

“I’m glad you’re alright,” she says, like the words are a little awkward on her tongue from disuse, like she means it anyways. 

Jim scratches the back of his neck, all too aware of the barely contained crowd jostling each other, just beyond the entrance to the hangar, trying to get a good look at him. Around him, the crew and the survivors they rescued, both their own and from Vulcan, continue to disembark and make their way to campus, and Jim wants nothing more than to fade into the background with them and disappear. 

“Uh, yeah,” Jim says, and he feels probably as awkward as she sounded. “I figured one Kirk was enough for that guy. Couldn’t let him think we were getting soft.”

Winona lets out a surprised sound that might’ve been a laugh in a better world, where she was less guarded and Jim was less scarred, but Jim smiles, feeling somehow satisfied and optimistic anyways. 

And then to his right, he hears a voice call out to him, that same low, urgent tone, that same quiet voice that Jim shouldn’t be able to hear through the noise around him but he does.

“Jim,” Bones says, and he’s pushing through to Jim’s side, his eyes wide and spacey around the edges like he gets when he doesn’t sleep enough, and Jim notices for the first time that Bones looks a bit battered and worse for wear, too, like the rest of them, even though Bones never once left that ship, even though all Bones has been doing is putting his head down and doing his job, and Jim wonders how close Bones was to deck six, how much time he spent pulling his colleagues out of the wreckage, how many of his own hurts he’s ignored to save those around him. 

Jim’s entire world tunnels out to just Bones by his side and Bones’ steady hand on Jim’s arm like Jim looks a little like he might keel over at any moment, and Jim thinks _Now_ , except he can’t now, because there are too many people around him and too many eyes on him and Jim has never liked doing anything knowing that everyone is watching. He’s lived enough of his life in the spotlight without even agreeing to it; he doesn’t want to let them have anything else. 

Next to him, Bones suddenly straightens up, squaring his shoulders and clearing his throat, and it takes Jim a moment too long to realize that Bones is looking past him now at his mother, nodding in greeting to her and pulling himself together to look a little less like he’s been on his feet for the better part of the past day.

“Commander Kirk,” Bones says, uncharacteristically tripping over his words. Jim wonders if it’s the exhaustion. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but uh, we’re taking the crew to Medical. I—uh, Jim included.”

Winona nods and smiles, a small thing like she’s trying to get used to trying to be gentle again. “Of course,” she says. She looks at Bones like she’s studying his face and then looks back at Jim, and there’s something thoughtful in her eyes, and Jim wonders what she’s noticed, wonders what she’s thinking. She gives Bones a look that’s probably meant to be kind, “Thank you for taking care of him.”

Bones nods and looks back at Jim, looks like he’s asking if Jim is alright, if he’s ready to brave the crowds of people gathered around the hangar’s exit, and Jim looks at Bones, looks at his steadiness and he remembers how Bones has carried on, always, in the face of everything the world had to throw at him, and he looks over at his mother, who must’ve made this same walk all those years ago, baby boy in her arms and an emptiness in her chest, and he thinks _Okay_ , thinks _Maybe I can do this after all_ , thinks _Maybe there will be more to my story than death and sacrifice_ , because maybe there will be more that matters, maybe there will be the people he loves too.

Jim stares at the wall of people he’s going to have to push through and feels the sharp bite of anxiety rise in his chest. “How did you do it?” Jim asks his mother. 

She looks out at the crowd too, her face a mask of calm, though Jim thinks if he looks hard enough, he can see a little of the fear in her too. “I just thought about how I had to get you home,” she says, and Jim thinks that he’s probably never given her enough credit. “Nothing else mattered.”

Jim takes a deep breath and nods, looks at Bones by his side, and thinks _Home_. Then he puts one foot in front of the other, and with his mother leading the charge, parting the crowd so he doesn’t have to, and Bones by his side, firm hand on his arm to keep Jim steady, Jim walks towards the exit and thinks to himself over and over, like he’s trying to shout over his own dread of being painted as a hero with no care about the person underneath, thinks _I am going home_.

\---

It’s probably a marker of how surreal the day has been that when Jim sets foot in Medical, which is quickly being filled to bursting with the members of his crew, the crew they managed to rescue from other ships, and the survivors from Vulcan, he feels a pressure in his chest release, like he can finally breathe again. It probably helps, too, that anyone who isn’t medical staff or someone who was on the _Enterprise_ is being banned from Medical, because it’s too full and too busy already, and even though Bones gets whisked off to attend to someone in critical condition almost immediately and Winona bids Jim goodbye outside the infirmary doors with a promise to see him later, Jim looks around him and sees faces that have now become familiar and feels a wave of relief washing over him, because it’s over now, finally, all of it. Bones nudges Jim in the direction of an available biobed, promising to meet him there as soon as he can to get him checked up, and as Jim wanders over, he passes Gaila and stops dead in his tracks. Uhura sits by her bedside, clutching at her hand like she’s afraid Gaila will disappear on her again, and Gaila looks haggard and tired but the displays around her bed read stable vitals, and Jim feels a sob rise in his throat. 

“Gaila?” he says, his voice coming out small and sad and probably a little pitiful, and she and Uhura look up, and Gaila’s expression breaks open, clapping a hand over her mouth like she’s seen a ghost. 

“Jim,” she breathes out, and Jim is running over to her before he can think, and she comes up to throw her arms around his shoulders and bury her face in his neck.

And they just stand there like that for like a long moment, two people who were probably never meant to make it this far, two people who despite all odds are still here, and Jim pulls away, just enough to cradle her head in his hands and lean his forehead to hers, and he thinks about the last time he saw her on Earth, before Kobayashi Maru, and he thinks about how small it all seems now, that test that seemed like his entire life just a day ago, and he feels petty and sorry. How could he, of all people, fail to see the bigger picture? How could he, of all people, think that one wrong thing could justify anything? 

“I’m sorry,” Jim says. “I’m so, so sorry. I—I _used_ you. I took advantage of your role in the simulation, and I’m sorry. I never should’ve done that.”

To Jim’s surprise, Gaila laughs, a sort of sad thing, with tears in her eyes, but not unkind. “Jim,” she says, like he’s still not getting it, after years of knowing each other. “Jim, you saved my life.”

Jim feels something ugly and guilty clench in his stomach. “That wasn’t me,” he says, insistent. “I didn’t—I wasn’t even on the ship when they sent out those rescue parties.”

Gaila smiles at him and lifts a hand to smooth his hair back. “Life is not about keeping score,” she says, and it sounds like forgiveness. 

“Jim.”

He turns around at the sound of Bones’ voice like he’s being drawn by a magnet, and Bones nods at the screens surrounding Gaila’s bed. 

“Why don’t we let her rest, okay?” he says, and Jim can see Gaila’s blood pressure and heart rate have gone up.

Jim nods and starts to back away, wondering what this means for the two of them, that Jim’s mere presence is stressing her out, but she catches his hand in hers before he can leave and she says, her voice breaking just slightly, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

He smiles and squeezes her hand, feeling a little more like he can draw the pieces of his life back together again after all of this. “You too,” he says, and then lets Bones lead him away. 

Jim feels a little like he’s living a dream, like he’s watching himself be led through Medical to an empty biobed, like it’s not really him sitting down in an infirmary full of a crew that’s his and not his, people who are here because of him and not because of him. And then Bones touches a hand to Jim’s jaw to turn his head just so to look at a nasty cut along the ridge of Jim’s head, and Jim just narrows down on Bones’ hands on him, carefully turning him this way and that, carefully looking him over for any lasting wounds. Jim watches Bones work for lack of anything better to do, not wanting to be caught in his own thoughts, looks at the slight pursed lips that Bones always gets when he’s focusing on something. Jim feels an ache in his chest and wonders when he started to fear that he’d never see Bones like this again, wonders how long it’ll be before he can look away without worrying that Bones won’t be there when he looks back again. 

Bones makes Jim stay in Medical for a few hours while he finishes up his rounds, grumbling about Jim’s concussion and bruised knuckles and cracked ribs, and Jim stays, despite knowing that Bones’ grumbling usually means that the worst of it all is over, despite wanting to get back to his room and climb into his own bed and finally have some space just to himself. But part of him knows that Bones will worry if he leaves, so he stays, and before Jim knows it, between coming down from the adrenaline high he’s been riding since Bones smuggled him onto the _Enterprise_ and the soothing whirring of the biobed beneath him, he’s fallen asleep. It’s probably the most relief he’s felt all day.

\---

Jim jerks awake an indeterminate amount of time later with flashes of the debris of destroyed ships floating behind his eyelids and panic high in his chest, his skin crawling with the need to do something, anything to save them, unspoken screams stuck in his throat. The first thing he sees when his eyes pop open is the clean white walls of Medical, and for a moment he fears that he’s still on that ship, that the end of the crisis was something he made up while knocked out, while the others kept on fighting without him, but as he blinks the spots out of his vision, he sees the calm day staff that he recognizes from his many visits to Bones at work and beds full of the crew that became his responsibility. Jim looks to his right and sees Bones slouched in a chair next to his bed, arms crossed and head lolling to one side, fast asleep, and Jim thinks, not for the first time, that Bones really is something else, to have stayed up that long past his time to clock out to make sure everyone on that ship got taken care of before doing anything else. Jim takes a deep breath and wills his pulse to slow, sitting up a little in the biobed. 

“Bones?” Jim tries, his voice coming out scratchy and tired. He clears his throat. His mouth feels heavy.

But before Jim can repeat himself, Bones is already rousing himself, inhaling sharply and then shaking his head like he’s trying to clear it from a thick fog. He blinks a few times like he, too, can barely drag himself awake, and rubs at his eyes before his gaze falls on Jim. Jim sees something soften in Bones’ expression and Jim could almost cry with relief, because finally, it’s not Bones the doctor looking over him with worried eyes documenting every cut and bruise, but it’s Bones, his best friend, smiling at him like they just won the world’s worst game of Russian roulette. 

“Hey,” Bones says, and his voice is gentle again instead of urgent and his posture is loose again instead of rigid. “How’re you feeling?”

Jim opens his mouth and realizes that there are so many things he wants to say, that part of him still can’t believe that he’s here, that he doesn’t know how Bones does it, trying to save others all the time without any promise that the people counting on him are going to be okay, that after all of this, after watching so many people die and confronting the worst demons from his past, he doesn’t know if he can ever do it again without Bones. But he finds that he can’t really bring himself to say any of it, his tongue tired and sluggish in his mouth, so all he says is: 

“Like I want to sleep for five years.”

Bones laughs then, a soft, quiet thing like it’s any other day, like they all didn’t just cheat death, just a little bit, and Jim finds himself thinking that maybe, despite everything, things will start to feel okay again someday.

“Alright, well, your doctor says you’re ready to be discharged,” Bones says, pushing himself to his feet with a groan. He extends a hand to Jim as if to help him up, “So, shall we?”

Jim almost wonders how Bones can act so normal after everything they’ve been through, after everything he must’ve seen trying to keep as many people alive for as long as possible on that ship, but when he takes Bones’ hand, it’s shaking, just a little, and Jim knows that for Bones, it’s a little like an earthquake. Bones guides Jim through the maze that Medical has become, packed to capacity for the first time in maybe forever, and he keeps one hand at the small of Jim’s back like he’s afraid if he lets go that Jim will wander off again. They pass Pike, who Bones promises is stable, and they pass Gaila, who’s got both Uhura and Tora by her bedside now, and Bones tells Jim that, miraculously, Tora was assigned to ground control, and as they leave Medical and begin the familiar walk back to the grad student dorms that feels like it’s from entire years of Jim’s life ago, Jim thinks _Okay, okay, okay_.

The room is just like they left it, with little piles of discarded clothing by the closet and at the foot of the bed, and the shoes by the door are still knocked askew from when Jim tripped over half of them on his way out the door the morning he took the Kobayashi Maru for the third time. Bones’ stack of PADDs still sits on the desk, each with paperwork waiting to be filed, paperwork that Jim knows will feel extra extraneous and tedious now, and a mug with the dregs of that morning’s coffee sits in the sink, waiting to be rinsed out. Jim wonders how he’s supposed to come back to this life now, how he’s just supposed to carry on like nothing happened, how anything like classes or assignments or tests will feel important knowing now what it is to fight for something bigger than himself. Jim wonders when normal will start feeling like normal again. 

Bones groans as they walk into the room, kicking off his shoes and peeling off his medical blues. He pauses in his regulation undershirt and turns to look at Jim, nodding towards the bathroom. 

“Okay if I shower?” he asks. “Or would you rather go first?”

And what Jim wants to say is that he has something to tell Bones, something that he’s been waiting for what feels like forever to say, something that maybe started the day they met, but he just shakes his head no and waves Bones on to the bathroom. It starts to feel like the two of them are playing at normalcy, Bones stepping out of the bathroom some minutes later dressed in the threadbare t-shirt and pajama bottoms that he always wears to sleep and Jim taking his turn in the bathroom and the two of them wordlessly getting ready for bed even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. And by the time they’re crawling into bed next to each other, Jim thinks he’s beginning to lose his resolve, because now that Bones is here next to him again and the threat of immediate death has passed, Jim worries about doing anything to ruin it all. Because what if Bones doesn’t feel the same way? What if Bones rejects him altogether? What if Bones, in his infinite kindness, lets Jim down easy but things aren’t ever the same again? Jim doesn’t know that he could bear it.

Bones is out in an instant, his expression going slack and his breathing evening out, and Jim tries closing his eyes and finding that same peace, tries to find that comfort in the sound of Bones’ gentle, constant breath. But as Jim tries to let himself relax and slip off into a sleep that should be so easy after the exertion of the past day, he’s jolted wide awake again, this time by the vision of what coming home would’ve meant if they’d both been just a little unluckier – if Bones had been on deck six when they’d been hit, if Bones had left Jim in that hangar and Jim had to watch as the starships got picked off one by one knowing that Bones was out there, if Jim hadn’t stopped Nero on time and Bones’ death rushed up to meet him in the form of the hulking, Romulan ship. Jim sits up suddenly, cradling his head in his hands, his breathing already picking up to full-blown panic attack speeds, and part of him hopes that Bones doesn’t wake for once, because he’s not sure he’s ready to face the consequences of explaining himself, and part of him hopes that Bones does wake, because Bones always wakes, because Bones is always there for Jim, because Jim clings to that hope as the words threaten to come out. 

“Jim?” Bones’ groggy voice comes from beside Jim, and Bones is up in an instant, yawning and sleep-heavy, but still, somehow, finding it in him to sit up next to Jim and touch a concerned hand to Jim’s shoulder. 

Bones’ fingertips land squarely on the tattoo on Jim’s shoulder, the place that Jim’s already memorized the shape of despite only having known about it for maybe a couple weeks, and Jim flinches so badly that he almost hits the wall next to him. Bones frowns. 

“Jim,” Bones says again, his voice deeper and sharper now, like he’s worried something is seriously wrong. “You okay?”

And Bones is looking at Jim like he’s waiting for Jim to lose his mind, like he’s waiting for Jim to fall to pieces, irreparably, and Jim feels Bones’ worry washing over him in waves, feels it settle like something heavy and oppressive over his skin, and Jim thinks _I can’t go on like this_ and thinks _After everything, how can I not trust him with this_ and thinks _Bones deserves better than worrying about a guy who can’t even say what he means_. Jim thinks that he’s probably more like his mother than he’d care to admit, unable to say what’s real, unable to live fully in the honesty of his feelings, and he thinks about what that distance did to him, thinks about how painful it was when talking to her was like talking to a wall, and he thinks _I have to be better_. 

Jim takes a deep breath and then another, and then when he opens his mouth, the words finally come, like a flood gate opening, and if it weren’t for the anxiety sitting high in his chest, he’d say he’s never felt more relieved. 

“Bones, I, um—Okay, look, a couple weeks ago, I was talking to Gaila and she kept trying to say something about my freckles, and like,” Jim says, his words coming out haltingly, in bursts and jolts, and he keeps not realizing until it’s too late that he’s barely making any sense at all, like he’s pulling all the thoughts he’s had since realizing he has Bones’ tattoo on him out of a hat and hoping that they fall into some sort of meaning. “Like I didn’t get it at the time, right? Like this isn’t something I think about, and I—I never thought—And I’ve known for like a week, I guess? And I don’t know, the Kobayashi Maru was coming up, and I thought, you know, maybe, if you knew you wouldn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and I just—I didn’t know if I could do it without you, you know? And I thought, after, you know, after I could tell you, maybe, but then things kept happening, and I didn’t have the time, and by the time we got back here, all I wanted to do was, I think, just try to pretend like everything was like it was. Like why mess up a good thing if you don’t have to, right? Except I think I was just scared, and I—I—”

Bones blinks owlishly at Jim, like he’s trying to put together the world’s worst puzzle, and Jim feels like his chest could explode. Bones’ mouth is slightly open, probably in shock of the endless avalanche of nonsense Jim is throwing at him, and his hands hover just over Jim’s skin like he’s afraid to touch him now, and all Jim can think is he’d really like if Bones’ hands were on him, if Jim could press his mouth to Bones’ to get him to stop looking at Jim like he’s well and truly lost it, because Jim realizes that in this instant, there’s nothing else in the world that matters to him. _I’ve got to get home_ , he thinks, inexplicably, and realizes that home is Bones and here and them, and it’s been that way for a long time without his realizing what that truly means. 

“Jim,” Bones says, shaking his head just so, his eyebrows coming together in confusion. “I—I don’t—”

“Bones,” Jim says, and it almost sounds like he’s sobbing, he’s so desperate to get it all out. “I’m in love with you. And I don’t know for how long or—or if this is even anything you could want from me, but I’m in love with you and I—I’ve got the tattoo to prove it.”

Jim turns his bare shoulder towards Bones and looks at the three dots that he can just see adorning the curve of it, bright and shiny and new, like all the thoughts Jim has been trying on in his head, trying to feel the weight of it all – _I am in love_ and _I am allowed to be in love_ and _I am in love with Bones_ , _I am in love with Bones_ , _I am in love with Bones_ – and over and over until it’s become something that doesn’t frighten Jim so much anymore. And Bones just stares, first at Jim’s face and then at Jim’s shoulder and back and forth like he can’t believe what he’s hearing, like he almost believes this is some sort of trick. Bones blinks, hard, and Jim, who has learned so well how to read Bones, can’t figure out a single thing he’s thinking. 

“Shit,” Bones breathes out, so quiet that Jim almost misses it, except how could he when every nerve in his body is so finely tuned to everything Bones does, and Jim feels his stomach sink, fearing the worst, fearing that this is the beginning of the end. 

And then before Jim even has time to process what’s going on, Bones’ hands are on Jim, coming up to cup Jim’s jaw, and he’s pressing his mouth to Jim’s. Jim gasps against Bones’ mouth, jumping a little in surprise, and their teeth bump against each other and the pressure on Jim’s jaw aches a little against his barely healed bruises, but Jim pushes himself into it anyways, hands bunching in Bones’ shirt, and he feels so warm and so full of feeling that it all comes rushing forth in jagged breathes that sound like sobs. Bones kisses him like he’s trying to make a home for himself inside Jim’s chest, his hands moving to run down his shoulders and arms and back, one hand pressing against Jim’s tattoo like he’s still trying to convince himself that it’s there, and by the time Bones pulls away, he’s breathing hard and his eyes are bright and his mouth is red and shiny, and it’s probably the best thing Jim’s ever seen in his life. 

Bones lets out a laugh in disbelief, like this is something he could only have dreamed about, and Jim feels his heart leap in his chest. 

“You couldn’t have done this a year ago?” Bones says, and Jim doesn’t get what he means until Bones pulls up the sleeve of his t-shirt to reveal the tattoo circling his left arm, the tattoo that Bones has been so careful about hiding for so long, the tattoo that Jim thought was meant for someone else. But it’s _Jim’s_ tattoo, the dark band fading into a shower of stars, and Jim wonders how he didn’t notice, but then, he thinks, he’s never been very good at letting himself have what he wants. 

Jim laughs, then, too, something giddy and light spilling out of him, and Bones kisses him again, this time soft and sweet and slow, kisses him like he’s something precious, like he’s something worth having, something worth waiting for, and Jim feels so light that he can’t remember why he thought it’d be a good idea to keep this all trapped inside of him in the first place. They fall asleep that day tangled around each other, careful inches between them traded in for loose limbs looping around each other’s backs and warm skin on skin, and Jim drifts off wondering how another person can feel so much like salvation. 

\---

Two days later – after sleeping for eighteen hours apiece for two nights in a row, after fending off admirals and the press and everyone wanting a word from the _Enterprise_ ’s impromptu captain, after making arrangements to honor the crew members that didn’t make it, after the number of patients checked into Medical start to dwindle to a more normal number, and after Jim sees his mother again, the two of them each making their own efforts to be better about each other now that there’s closure in their tragedy – after all of that, Bones takes Jim out to dinner. He takes Jim to their favorite Indian restaurant and they eat a lot of food and drink a lot of wine and then Bones takes Jim back to their room and they fall into bed together, and Jim learns that there’s a lot he still doesn’t know about Bones.

What Jim learns is this, that what Bones does can only be described as making love, not fucking like Jim has spent his whole adult life doing, trying to find solace and anonymity in someone else. What Jim learns is this, that Bones is gentle and tender and steady, even in this, that Bones makes love like Jim is the beginning and end of the entire universe, like Jim is the only thing that matters, like Jim is a treasure Bones never wants to lose.

And this, Jim learns about himself, too, that Bones coming apart beneath him is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life, that when Bones presses his mouth to Jim’s shoulder and bites down on his tattoo, it feels less like possession and more like Jim’s entire being is being released from the prison he’s been locked in his whole life, that when Bones cries out Jim’s name, Jim swears he could see stars behind his eyelids, swears that he’ll ask for nothing else until the end of time if it means just being able to have this for the rest of his life.

“We couldn’t have done that a couple days ago?” Jim asks, after, rubbery-limbed and flushed and resting his head on Bones’ bare chest, listening to his racing heart gradually slow. 

Bones laughs, and Jim feels the rumble of it through his cheek and can’t help the smile that blooms on his face, and Jim wonders what it would’ve been like to have been this person all along, what it would’ve been like to be a person of easy smiles and few worries like Bones makes him feel like. 

“Oh come on, you know we were way too tired for anything like this,” Bones says, and his voice is light like maybe Jim’s never heard it, and Jim thinks that maybe Bones has been holding himself back this whole time, too, like this is the person that being with Jim is letting him be. Bones looks down at Jim and smiles softly, saying, “And anyways, I like to buy someone dinner first before sleeping with them. I’m kind of old-fashioned, I guess.”

“Really?” Jim laughs, thinking about Bones’ preference for hands-on medicine in favor of newfangled technology, Bones’ habit of writing certain important things down on paper even though paper can be lost and electronic notes can’t. “I never would’ve guessed.”

Bones rolls his eyes. “Asshole,” he says, and shoves Jim until Jim falls off the bed with a yelp. 

Bones laughs when Jim hoists himself back into the bed and threatens to kick Bones out of their room in retaliation, and Jim thinks that the world may have almost ended and there’s every possibility that neither of them will be the same people they were ever again, but in this moment, with Bones laughing at him, with him, peppering Jim’s skin with kisses, with Jim’s tattoo sitting firmly on his skin like a badge of honor, Jim thinks that maybe, despite everything, they’re going to end up doing okay after all. 

\---

In the end, there are things that will never be the same again, Jim knows. He’ll never see Sora again over lunch, Sora who was on one of the first ships out and never came back, and when he goes back to teach his combat class when classes start up again after a generous break to all of the cadets, he knows the room will be half-empty. He knows that Spock and the other Vulcans will never see their homeworld again, that the beautiful orange planet, with all its history and culture, is a thing of memory now, and he knows that there are so many now, who like him, will live in the shadow of their dead relatives, trying to prove that they’re enough to honor their loved ones. 

But there are things, at least, that are still good, and this is what his mother has taught him, without meaning to, just by continuing to live her life despite the losses she’s suffered – that there are always reasons to keep going, that even if you don’t forget the bad things, even if you don’t forget the people you’ve lost, there are ways to build up your life again to make it stable again. He finds himself thinking, sometimes, _I will never let this happen to my crew again_ , even though he knows that space is vast and untamable, even though he knows that the world out there will still continue to take and take and take without any remorse and there’s little he can do to stop it. But Jim looks around him, sometimes, at the members of the _Enterprise_ crew, who have taken to sticking together in the remaining weeks of school, like there’s something they all discovered in themselves that day, and he looks at Bones, who complains about flying off into the abyss in a starship but makes no attempts at leaving, who starts getting his affairs in order to be ready to be appointed officially as CMO on a starship, who despite Jim’s clumsiness with the love in his chest keeps staying and keeps letting Jim in and keeps teaching Jim in all the little ways that love can be worth it too, and he thinks _Thank you, at least, for this_.

**Author's Note:**

> ETA (Sept. 18): so sorry for taking so long with the final update - I was traveling and then moving into my new apartment and getting ready to start my first year of grad school (!!!!!!) and life's been a little bit of a mess - but chapter 3 is about as long as the other two chapters combined, so I hope it's worth it! thank you so, so very much for reading! I've been fairly overwhelmed by some of the responses I've gotten to this fic! this fic has been so much fun to write and it's the academy era fic I always wanted to write but never did and I'm just so grateful! all of your kudos/comments are so greatly appreciated! 
> 
>  
> 
> for reference, in case anyone was wondering: [Jim's tattoo](http://www.boredart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Unique-Arm-Band-Tattoo-Designs-1.jpg) (but only the band closer to the wrist), [Jocelyn's tattoo](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cd/49/91/cd499145663cfc94555f09fbe3b6e072.jpg) that Bones has on him, and Bones' tattoo is just three dots in a line.
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](http://leosmccoy.tumblr.com)!


End file.
